How the Severance Team Made a Second Season Worth the Wait

Ben Stiller isn’t a fan of puzzle box shows. “I never watched all of Lost, I’m sorry to say,” he admits. “I sometimes get frustrated because I’m not really good at figuring stuff out.” So he’s an odd fit for director, executive producer, and creative force behind the buzziest show of that genre to emerge in recent years, Severance, the second season of which premieres Jan. 17 on Apple TV+ after a nearly three-year hiatus.

But Stiller and producer and star Adam Scott recognized the potential in newcomer Dan Erickson’s surreal script: Employees volunteer to undergo an operation, called severance, that bifurcates the consciousness into work life and personal life. Each morning, the severed person enters an elevator at Lumon Industries, a mysterious biotech company, and their work self or “innie” becomes conscious. At 5 p.m., the “innie” clocks out and the “outie” reemerges with no memory of the job. Erickson came up with the concept while working a mind-numbing gig at a door factory. “It’s one of those ideas where you can’t believe this hasn’t been done,” says Scott. “It’s an immediate hook.”

And it was Stiller’s idea to end Season 1 with one of the most memorable cliffhangers in modern TV history. The innie characters stage a jailbreak, during which Scott’s protagonist, Mark, discovers that the wife his outie believed to be dead is alive and trapped inside Lumon. Simultaneously, innie Mark’s love interest Helly (Britt Lower) learns that her outie, Helena, is the daughter of Lumon’s cultish CEO; she underwent severance to build support for the controversial procedure.

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Erickson’s original Season 1 script explored the fallout of these revelations. But Stiller liked pausing on the precipice of the perverse love triangle—or quadrangle—of Mark torn by two halves of his consciousness toward two women. “I felt like, giving it that ending, they’d be more likely to pick us up for a second season,” Stiller adds, laughing. Apple did, immediately. Though the streamer does not release viewership data, it’s easily one of their most discourse-dominating series. The show was nominated for 14 Emmys and won two.

But Stiller did not plan to make viewers wait three years for more. Success brought mounting pressure. “There was a little bit of a moment of overwhelmed panic,” Erickson says. “You’re grateful for people’s investment, and you want to do right by them.” Shooting was delayed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes. Costs reportedly ballooned to $200 million, one of the most expensive budgets on TV. And while the Season 1 twist hooked enough viewers to perhaps justify that expense, the second season not only needs to remind them what happened years ago, but also pay off on the mystery—a feat few puzzle box shows accomplish.

There is a moment in Season 2 in which Mark’s “innie” has to button his shirt. For the first take, Scott fumbled as he fastened it. “Ben was like, ‘What are you doing?’” Scott remembers. “I was like, ‘I’ve never put on a shirt before.’” After all, Mark’s innie always arrives at work with his clothes already buttoned and zipped. Stiller let Scott try a few takes as if he were a toddler. “It felt kind of corny,” says Scott. “It takes forever if you’re like, ‘Wow, sleeves!’ We decided there was some knowledge instilled in him with the memory of how to do it.”

The Severance team is constantly negotiating with the rules of its sci-fi world. The very idea of severance has myriad horrifying applications. In Season 1, one character severs her consciousness so as not to experience the pain of childbirth—so the only world her innie knows is giving birth and handing over her baby. It’s a plot point that evokes The Handmaid’s Tale, and the divide between those who can afford to avoid hardship and those who can’t. As the events of Season 2 unfold, something akin to a class war breaks out between innies and outies.

Erickson—who, unlike Stiller, is a big fan of Lost and geeked out over it with Scott on set—admits to trolling the Reddit message boards for Severance. “I get such a warm feeling going through those threads,” he says. “But occasionally I would see a theory that I am like, ‘Oh, shoot, that might be better than what I have planned.’ That would get me in my head. So I had to kind of back away.”

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House of Cards creator Beau Willimon was brought in, before the strikes, to refine the story for Season 2 and beyond. “We were a bit behind on schedule, but we didn’t want to make any compromises,” Erickson recalls. Willimon had proven his mastery of story not only on House of Cards but the Star Wars spinoff Andor. “He writes with a propulsiveness that never feels artificial. He helped streamline a lot and get everybody to the finish line.”

In the first season, Scott was the only outie whose life the show explored in any real way, though we got to know many innies, played by John Turturro, Christopher Walken, and Zach Cherry, among others. Many of them have severed to escape some aspect of their lives; the series gradually builds into a parable about the dangers of compartmentalizing anguish. Now that the show delves deeper into outie stories, the actors are tasked with playing, essentially, two characters.

“There are differences physically. It’s subtle. We certainly didn’t want it to feel like one of them had a limp and one of them didn’t,” Scott says. “Outie Mark’s posture isn’t quite as good as innie Mark’s. I think innie Mark has an emotional and physical optimism. They have a slightly different timbre to their voice. I hesitate talking about it because it sounds so actor-y.” But, he says, even the imperceptible differences shift his approach to a scene.

That contrast between innie and outie is most stark for Lower. As Helly, she’s a rabble-rousing innie eager to start a revolution in the underground offices. As Helena, she’s the daughter of a CEO who does not view innies as real people. To prepare, Lower would listen to different music for the two roles: Helly listens to Patti Smith, Helena to sweeping orchestrals. Lower pulls out a notebook and shows me drawings she would make each morning before filming: Helly’s pictures are abstract and wild, often using mashed-up crayons, the expression of an inner child. Helena’s are traditional, neat watercolor landscapes. “The outie is more nurture, and the innie is nature. The outie is ego and the innie is id,” she says. “But they share a subconscious, and they share trauma.”

Erickson adds: “The same traits can make somebody a freedom fighter in one life and a tyrant in another.”

As the trailer teases, the characters spend more time outside the claustrophobic walls of Lumon this season, at one point trudging through deep snow. The vast backdrop is beautiful but only moderately less foreboding than the oppressively sterile office where most of Season 1 takes place.

These cinematic possibilities are what initially attracted Stiller to the show. He could envision Lumon’s labyrinthian white halls as soon as he read the script, and the surprising landscapes that certain doors lead to, like a fluorescent-lit field filled with goats tended by somewhat feral herders. He wanted to conjure something equally bleak for the outside world. “One thing that Ben said was we have to give the sense that you’re always at Lumon even when you’re not at Lumon,” says Erickson, “this overall feeling of coldness that sort of envelops this town.” To that end, the entire show takes place in the dead of winter.

Lumon as a Big Bad takes many forms. There’s its mythical leader as represented in creepy murals; the Egan family, whose members speak with religious fervor about capitalist enterprise; and Mark’s boss Mr. Milchick, played by series breakout Tramell Tillman, whose dance moves from a sinisterly awkward office party went viral.

Tillman's life changed overnight with Severance's success. He attended his first Comic-Con in San Diego the summer after the show debuted and found himself mobbed by fans at parties for autographs. I attended that Comic-Con: The Severance panel was one of the most packed events of the weekend, despite the fact that Severance doesn't hold the same sway as established IP like Lord of the Rings or Marvel. "We were like the Beyoncé or Taylor Swift of Comic-Con," Tillman jokes.

This season, Tillman's character struggles to keep the innies in check. His facade begins to crack, but the show takes its time when it comes to revelations about Milchick and others. “We’ve wrapped Season 2, and I’m still speculating about my character and his trajectory,” Tillman says. “But that’s what makes it fun.”

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Mystery series have a long history of posing intriguing questions only to offer lackluster answers. Shows like Lost, Westworld, and Mr. Robot have faced fan wrath for this reason. Accordingly, I reentered the world of Lumon with skepticism. But by the fourth episode, a major standout that jolts the viewer visually and narratively, it was clear the series had pulled far from its last trick.

By season’s end, the show offers more than just clues about what Lumon is up to. “You can’t keep dragging people along withholding answers,” says Erickson. Though, ultimately, plot machinations will wind up being less important than the relationships between the characters. Mystery shows tend to go awry when they throw too much plot at the audience. Ultimately the answer to “What is the smoke monster?” or “What’s at the center of Westworld’s maze?” or “Who is Mr. Robot?” might not live up to expectations. What sustains a show is whether a love affair feels deep, whether a character comes by a change in perspective honestly.

Severance happens to feature a fascinating cast of characters who volunteered to cut their lives in half in order to escape some deep pain. In Season 2, we learn more about the source of that pain. And that, more than any well-plotted twist, is what elevates it from a satisfying puzzle to a great story.

Write to Eliana Dockterman at eliana.dockterman@time.com.