‘Severance’ Creator Spills All About the Wild Second Season

Severance was a 2022 phenomenon, intriguing and baffling in equal measure and ending on a pitch-perfect cliffhanger that suggested its head-spinning tale was just getting started. Three years later, the show finally returned on Jan. 17 to answer some of its myriad questions—although anyone hoping for neat-and-tidy resolutions will want to temper those expectations.

To an even greater degree than during its maiden run, the Apple TV+ hit’s second season delivers an avalanche of mysteries designed to keep audiences guessing, theorizing, and scratching their heads.

At the same time, however, it provides tantalizing new details about the Lumon corporation and its “severance” technique, which psychologically splits people in two, so they have separate work and home selves. Employees Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry), Helly (Britt Lower), and Irving (John Turturro) are at further war with themselves now that their “Innies” (i.e., the versions of themselves that toil on Lumon’s subterranean 7th floor) have had a taste of their “Outies”’ lives.

A mind-boggler par excellence, Severance is as assured and out-there as ever in its sophomore season, and credit for its beguiling power goes, first and foremost, to creator/showrunner Dan Erickson.

Juggling multiple threads and characters, introducing a raft of new supporting players, and detonating a steady stream of bombshells, Erickson maintains a firm grip on his sci-fi material—a not-inconsiderable accomplishment given how far and wide his wackadoo tale winds up journeying.

Collaborating once again with one of TV’s finest casts as well as executive producer/director Ben Stiller, Erickson spins a tangled web of corporate malfeasance, cubicle drudgery, religious fanaticism, and internal strife. Explaining just enough to hook viewers while dropping breadcrumbs about grander conspiracies and conflicts, it’s an impressive feat of small-screen storytelling that teases, shocks, and thrills like few others.

Awash in twists and turns, Severance’s latest go-round proves to be worth the wait. As a result, we were excited to speak with Erickson about its numerous surprises and potential future—all without spoiling any of its biggest stunners.

I know how Severance’s second season ends, so my first question is: How far out have you mapped this story? Is there a set (or necessary) end point, be it a third, fourth, or fifth season?

We’re pretty sure we know how many seasons; we’re not necessarily saying it yet because we’re not one 100 percent sure. But even before we knew that, pretty much going back to before I brought the show to Apple, I was working on it with Ben. We were working on a pitch document for the show which included an overall season series plan. Through that, we came up with what we thought was a pretty cool endpoint—a place to bring our characters and to conclude the story and the corporate conspiracy mystery.

Most of that has stuck and is still what we’re planning to do. But we’re trying not to over-plan and we’re trying not to under-plan, because we also want to be flexible enough to let the show surprise us and let it have an organic life of its own.

Speaking of flexibility, how much of the second season was set in stone, and how much of it changed along the way? You’re obviously not making it up as you go along, but is there leeway to maneuver, creatively speaking, during the production of each season?

No, the whole show is improvised—we just turn on the camera and the actors riff [laughs].

Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of unexpected twists and turns that happen in the writer’s room. Every time we’ve opened up a writer’s room, I’ve come in with a plan. In Season 2, it was almost entirely new writers, so they were coming from this outside perspective and the show had not come out yet; they had just seen early cuts of each episode. Before I shared my plan, I asked them, where do you guys think it’s going? And where do you want it to go? What are elements of it that you think we absolutely must explore?

Some of their answers weren’t what I was expecting, and it provided some really interesting new ideas, and then those got woven into the story. But it’s like, the river changes course, but it always ends up in the ocean. We know where the ocean is—there’s just some flexibility in how to get there.

There was lots of talk about Season 2’s delay. What was the primary reason—the 2023 strike? The complexity of the story?—that the show took so long to return?

The strike was certainly a big part of it, and I was very much in support of that both on the writers’ side and the actors’ side, because especially now having worked in this job, I know how much people have to give for this. We were shut down for five months at the end of the day, and then there was a period of having to ramp back up and get back into production. It was different than the pandemic—because of course we got shut down during Season 1 for COVID. But during that time, I could still write. During a strike, it’s pencils down. I was trying to not even really think about the show. So it was a different thing.

Right. That makes sense.

But then it’s also the other thing; it’s the complexity too. It actually took us about the same amount of time to make Season 2 as it did Season 1, but nobody was tapping their toe for Season 1 because they didn’t know what it was yet. It’s a really intricate show and we have really high standards for it, especially now. So that’s what it all came down to.

Season 1 ends with an all-time great cliffhanger. At what point did you decide how you wanted to address it? Does a talked-about ending like that create pressure, not only in terms of how you’re going to proceed from it, but how you’re going to match it at the end?

In terms of starting Season 2—and I don’t think this is really a spoiler, because it’s in the trailer—at the end of the day, we thought that the most direct route was the most interesting, which is: Let’s just sit down with the characters and let them ask the questions they would naturally ask after something like this happened.

We have Devon (Jen Tullock) telling Mark that your Outtie said “she’s alive,” and what the hell does that mean? And them trying to wrap their heads around that. Then on the Innie side, we have Dylan asking, what did you guys see up there? And each of them trying to make sense of what they learned. Sometimes, we find that the questions we ask in the writer’s room, you can just have the characters ask those same questions, and that ends up leading to the most interesting version of that scene.

For the finale, without giving away anything, we wanted to do something that was a little bit of a departure. We didn’t just want to replicate what we did with the first season finale, even though we were all really happy with that. We wanted to try something that was different. So this is very much its own thing. It’s a new type of episode that we’ve never really done before.

Severance’s sophomore run piles mysteries upon mysteries. Is that a delicate balancing act—to give people enough to keep them intrigued, while also holding key information back and hinting at larger mysteries?

Yeah, it’s extremely delicate, and hard to get right. I think I’m a bit of a people pleaser, so I want to give people answers to everything—the questions that they’re literally asking for answers to, I’m like, yes, let me provide that! But if you go too far down that route, suddenly you’ve taken all the mystery and magic out. So we had to modulate that impulse from me a little bit. But you also don’t want to drag people along. You want people to feel like this is moving in a certain direction that could be interesting.

You provide backstories for all the main characters in Season 2. Was it necessary to let us into their Outie lives more, in order to create tension between the Outie/Innie worlds?

It felt like it would be a little bit of a tease to show the Outtie world and reveal elements of the Outtie lives at the end of Season 1 and then not go back to that. We felt we had made a promise to continue to explore that. At the same time, I wanted to, because there’s a lot of delicious storytelling to be done there, because for every severed character, there’s this implicit question of why did they do it?

That question has to be of the Outtie because they’re the ones who made the decision. I don’t know that anybody who is totally healthy and happy chooses to get severed. So for every character, you want to get into, what were they hiding from and why did they think that this was the answer, and whatever it is that is broken in them, that caused them to do this, can it be fixed?

These new episodes expand the scope of the story in numerous ways, including in terms of settings—the action takes place over a wider geographical stretch. Was there ever a concern about gravitating too far away from Lumon, given that it’s the nucleus of the entire show?

That’s another very tricky tightrope to walk because I think my impulse is always to expand explore other elements of this world. I’ve always thought it would be cool to get out of the corporate world, or get out of the town of Kier, and see the way that this technology has affected other places and other facets of life. But it’s also true that the show has an extremely specific tone and so much of it is married to this town and these hallways. So you want to expand and grow and let the show become something new and interesting, but you don’t want to find yourself just suddenly making a corporate thriller that doesn’t feel like Severance anymore. because anyone could do that. We want to keep making this show.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Severance is the crazy Kier Eagan philosophy. Do you have a fully written Kier bible from which you can take passages? Or have you only produced the material we see in the show?

The Lumon handbook that is mounted in the MDR office under Kier’s portrait is, for the Innies anyway, sort of the bible. It’s a guide about how to act and how to honor Kier. There are definitely large stretches of that which have been written that have not been shown. Any time where I know we’re going to see any pages of it, I try to write that myself, and I often end up writing a lot more than we need because I think it’s fun. There’s a lot of that. But it’s certainly not complete.

Also, the texts that we’ve seen are not necessarily all there is. There may be other Kier texts that provide even more insight into his greater agenda and philosophy. There’s stuff you haven’t seen, but it’s not like I have the whole book in my house [laughs].

There are quite a few notable new faces in Season 2. Was there a concerted effort to make sure they didn’t overshadow the story and turn this into a cameo-fest?

We weren’t really interested in stunt casting. Even the actors we brought in who are very notable, we picked them because we thought they were the best fit for that character and also a fit for the tone of the show. I think the show almost begs for the presence of Bob Balaban. I mean, he fits so well into the aesthetic, and his voice and his look—it just feels so right. It was the same when we were crafting some of these other departments. There was one department where it was like, this department just feels like Gwendoline Christie. It feels like she should be here. So we went and got her.

The hope is that we’re never taking people out of it, but that we’re getting the actors that we think are really the best for the job.

Given that it took three years to produce a second season, is there hope that it’ll take less time to put together a third chapter—provided one is in the cards?

If the third season comes—and I would certainly be very happy if it did—it would be great if it didn’t take three years. We are looking at ways, and I think ways have presented themselves, to tighten up the process and get it done more quickly. This is, in part, because the story has gotten more solidified as we’ve gone along. We’ve figured out more and more about what we want to do. I think there’s less blue-sky figuring out of things as we go along. Then procedurally, we’re like, well, we know now what works and what doesn’t work. So we’re just going to try to streamline.