The second season of Severance is off and running on Apple TV+, serving up more of the brain-tingling mysteries fans picked over in the nearly three-year gap since season 1. The first two episodes of season 2, "Hello, Ms. Cobel" and "Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig," told flip sides of the same story: the first episode spent all of its time in the basement of Lumon Industries, where the "severed" employees know only what the managers want them to know; and the second entirely in the outside world, where we learned that those managers were lying their faces off in the premiere.
“I think that those episodes work really well as a pair,” showrunner Dan Erickson told The Hollywood Reporter. “There was just a lot of dramatic tension to be built, and then we realized that we could pay that off in the second episode.”
Elaborating on this point after episode two, Erickson added: “There was just a lot of dramatic tension to be built, and then we realized that we could pay that off in the second episode.”
"It’s always about stacking the mysteries on top of each other. Think of a pyramid where with each season, you’re answering some things but that opens the door to a larger mystery that was underneath."
So far that strategy has worked for the show. Per Deadline, Parrot Analytics has calculated that the first season of the show made Apple a cool $200 million, with half of that being earned in the 12 months since the season 1 finale. That tells you that people were finding the show long after the first season had concluded, hinting at good word of mouth.
Granted, the method by which Parrot Analytics figured out how much money Severance made Apple is arcane; it has to do with how much "audience demand" there is a for a show, which if history is any guide involves how much people are talking about it online. For its part, Apple hasn't commented on these figures.
Also, we know that the second season of Severance cost around $200 million to make, so it will need to make more than $200 million for Apple for the expenditure to be worth it. I know I'm interested to see what happens next, so they may get there.
When Adam Scott's cocaine jokes give people the wrong idea
Severance season 2 opens with a thrilling scene where Mark S. (Adam Scott) runs through the clean white hallways of Lumon, confused and bewildered. The last thing he knew, he was in the outside world for the first time ever, until he went offline and found himself back at work. All that running hard, and apparently it's not the only physical work Adam Scott will do this season. "I got a concussion at one point," he shared during a recent visit to Late Night with Seth Meyers, although he declined to say how. "I got it. It happened." Look out for a stunt or two from Mark this year.
"A little while later, I got this nosebleed that would not stop," Scott continued. "Like, no matter what we did, we could not get my nose to stop bleeding. It was disgusting and frustrating, but also, when there's an actor who has a nose that will not stop bleeding, obviously, it's cocaine, right? We all know this."
"So I was just, I was just sort of overcompensating and making way too many cocaine jokes. Trying to reassure everyone that it wasn't cocaine. But, for sure, by the end of the day, everyone thought it was cocaine."
Scott ended up in the ER for that problem, with executive producer Ben Stiller taking a picture of the very uncomfortable procedure; you can see it in the video above.
So that's what's happening behind the scenes of the show. Onscreen, there are still a lot of questions to be answered, like what happened to Mark's wife Gemma, whom he thought dead. She turned up on the severed floor as "Ms. Casey," but we don't know if she knows who she is, or where she was going when she walked down that long dark hallway towards the end of season 1.
“You’re going to get a sense of the reality that Gemma has been living in, and more of a sense of the experiences that she’s had,” Erickson teased. “We’ve seen a very narrow sliver of it, and I think people are going to be excited to see what we’ve got there.”
New episodes of Severance drop Fridays on Apple TV+.
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