Severance is a sci-fi workplace dramedy that came out of nowhere in 2022 and built an eager audience now salivating over the upcoming second season, which premieres on Apple TV+ in just a couple weeks. The show follows Mark, an office drone who works for a mysterious corportation called Lumon Industries. Mark is "severed," meaning he doesn't remember anything of what happened to him at work when he's outside the office, and vice versa. Essentially, work-Mark — or Mark's "innie," in the parlance of the show — is kind of an entirely new person, and he's finding he may not appreciate his outie sticking him in this weird white basement where he and his severed coworkers do heaven-knows-what all day long.
"The initial concept just came because I hated my job, and I was finding myself wishing that I could disassociate from it," Severance creator Dan Erickson told Vanity Fair. "I worked at a door factory. I had just finished grad school, and I was feeling like I should be moving my career ahead, and not cataloging door hinges. I was walking into work one day, and it was just, like, ‘I wish so much that it was five o’clock right now, and I could just jump ahead and have done the work, but not have to experience it.’ That led to thinking about how we are all different people at work and, when we go to these different spaces, we become these different versions of ourselves."
But what kind of show would Severance be? Executive producer Ben Stiller, who also directs some of the episodes, talked about the original idea during an episode of Hot Ones. “It always, for me was started in comedy, really, because it’s sort of a workplace comedy, but it’s also very, very strange and maybe a little bit scary,” he said, citing shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation as inspiration. “Then as the show developed, it got a little weirder and stranger and maybe less comedic than I’d originally thought it was.”
You can still feel that comedy influence, and the show even has a Parks and Rec connection though Adam Scott, who plays Mark. But the show went a lot darker than Stiller initially thought. The cast has kept up, with Stiller even comparing Scott to Bryan Cranston, who made people laugh on Malcolm in the Middle before terrifying them on Breaking Bad. Those are big shoes to fill, and Severance isn't even two seasons into its life yet, but why not aim high?
Beware SPOILERS for Severance season 1 below
At the end of Severance season 1, Mark and his teammates at Lumon found a way for their innie selves to manifest even when they were outside the office. All of them found out some pretty important things about their outies; the last thing we learn is that Mark's wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), who he thinks is dead, is actually alive and living as an apparently severed person at Lumon, where she goes by the name Ms. Casey. Gemma's death was what sent outie Mark into a spiral in the first place, inspiring him to get severed so he could dissociate from the pain. And now innie Mark knows she's alive.
How will that resolve? Like much else on Severance, it's a mystery. "Knowing how Season 1 ended, there were so many obviously big questions. We now have sort of opened up the world for the innies who have been on the outside world, so we felt like there was a responsibility to open up the story in that way and ratchet up the stakes and really dig into these relationships in terms of what Mark is dealing with in this very unique situation of the innie and the outie," Stiller told Collider. "The first season was so much about Mark trying to navigate this world, and then now realizing, having had his innie be on the outside world and learn this incredibly impactful thing about his wife, to follow up on that and that journey, to me it's always been about Mark's journey towards figuring out who he is."
Speaking to IGN, Scott also weighed in on what the end of season 1 meant for Mark."In Season 1, gradually he's becoming more and more disillusioned with this company that he believes in, that is his whole life. But I think he thought he had hit the ceiling of the depravity that Lumen was capable of," he said. "And I think this final piece of information goes beyond any expectation that he ever had of how horrible something could be. I don't think he ever imagined that someone would do something so terrible to another person. So this is a huge piece of information and yeah, Season 2 is about what he's going to do with that piece of information. And then whether or not that piece of information is going to reach his outie."
Get ready for "new locations and new characters" in Severance season 2
So if Mark finds himself back at Lumon, he's going to be far more skeptical than before. He'll be looking for answers, but the company won't make it easy. Apple TV+ has actually made the first eight minutes of Severance season 2 available to watch for subscribers, who saw that Mark got thrown some curveballs. To start, his former teammates — Dylan (Zach Cherry), Irving (John Turturro), and Helly (Britt Lower), have been replaced by a new crop of severed employees played by Bob Balaban, Alia Shawkat, Stefano Carannante and Sarah Bock.
You can bet that Lumon is throwing up this kind of roadblock to stop Mark's progress. A new character played by Game of Thrones veteran Gwendoline Christie could also prove a challenge. "In terms of Gwendoline, it’s pretty clear she’s in a different department," Stiller said. "She is doing some kind of work where she’s not in an office. There are people who are not in the white-collar aspect of what goes on at Lumon but who get their hands dirty and are working towards other ends. And one of the fun parts of the show I think is also trying to figure out how all these different departments connect with each other."
Based on what Stiller and Erickson have to say, it sounds like season 2 will go a ways towards solving some of the enduring mysteries of the show. There are no shortage of them at Lumon. What's the point of the severance procedure? What are Mark and co actually doing down there? What's with the goats? Theories have popped up to explain all this, and everyone will be tuning in to see the official version.
"The idea is also to start moving further towards this question of what is the company actually trying to do, and why do they need all this secrecy?" Erickson said. "In a way, severance is the ultimate NDA because it means that you literally can’t share what’s going on, and the characters themselves don’t know what’s going on on the floor. But they will take steps towards figuring that out, and that’s going to involve new locations and new characters."
"I think things get darker. We very much wanted to put our heroes in a scarier place because season one ends with them poking the bear. They form this little rebellion, and they’re able to achieve a modicum of success with it, but the question with season two was: What happens when the bear pokes back? What’s the fallout of this victory that they had? I think, without giving much away, the fallout is dire."
It'll definitely be exciting to see things move forward. But where is this all ultimately going? We're not sure how long beyond season 2 Severance will last, but Erickson has always had an end point in mind, which according to him is "more or less intact to this day." As for what that endpoint is, we'll just have to watch.
Why did Severance season 2 take so long to make?
The first season of Severance ended all the way back in 2022. That is a very long time to wait for new episodes. Apparently there were a lot of unexpected roadblocks the team had to deal with between seasons 1 and 2. "It took a while to write season two. Then we started to shoot in October of 2022, and we got shut down by the strike in May ," Stiller explained. "At that point, we had completed about 7 of our 10 episodes, and then we had to regroup after the strike. It takes us a while to prep the show. And so, we didn’t start shooting until January . Then we shot from January to May to finish the last three episodes."
Beyond that, apparently Erickson and company sometimes went so far as constructing a new set for an episode only to decide they didn't need it, which obviously would have slowed things down. "On a practical level, it’s a very intricate show," Erickson said. "Each character has two lives—essentially, two personalities—and we are expanding. For me, the writing was the most painstaking part of the process because there were so many ways we could go. And sometimes we would come up with something that worked perfectly well on paper, and then it wouldn’t be until we got there and we’re shooting it that we realize: This isn’t quite it. We were never willing to let that turn it into something that wasn’t perfect."
"[We had] entire locations that we were planning to go to. We had already built or partially built them when we realized, ‘Oh, that’s not going to work.’ Those aren’t always fun calls to have with the studio, where you’re. like, ‘Hey, you know that thing you put a lot of resources into? Well, we’re not going to do it now, or we’re going to do something that’s totally different.’ But again, at the end of the day, it’s worth it."
With reports like that, you start to understand why this new season cost so much to make. But if it's good, all will be forgiven. And it sounds like the team is determined to make it work. When asked what he hopes people will think after they finish watching season 2, Scott was blunt: "I hope they'll say the exact same thing, 'Holy F, I need Season 3.'"
Just so long as we get it a bit sooner this time. Severance season 2 premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday, January 17.
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