Severance, TV’s most mind-bending show, returns: ‘Even my landlord asked what’s going on with the goats’
Who is in charge? What are they working on? And why is there livestock in the office? The deliciously weird workplace drama has finally returned, but can it live up to expectations and answer its many mysteries? The show’s cast and creator (try to) reveal all
A month before Severance first aired in February 2022, billboards emblazoned with huge images of Adam Scott wearing a thousand-yard stare began to spring up around Los Angeles. “You always think it’s going to be this joyful moment when you see something like that,” says Scott, the show’s star and one of its producers. He appeared on the posters alongside the tagline “We’re all different people at work”, a wink to the premise of the series, a twisty, darkly comic thriller about office workers who have an experimental chip implanted into their brains in order to forget their work lives outside the office, and vice versa.
Scott had, he adds, “been waiting a long time for that moment – but I had this immediate adverse reaction. I got nauseous and my palms started sweating, because we had no idea how this thing would be received.” He had found Severance “fascinating and sad and funny” and thought it was something special, but it had been filmed in a Covid bubble and, he adds, “you never know”. Despite a TV career that has included the likes of Parks and Recreation and Big Little Lies, he was worried that he was about to become the face of a flop. “This is a weird show,” he says. “I thought maybe people were going to think we were weirdos.”
Luckily, he couldn’t have been more wrong. In the years since, Apple’s series has become one of the most talked-about TV shows around, the definition of a slow-burn hit in an increasingly fragmented and fickle streaming era. It is also one that seamlessly marries a cast of screen veterans such as John Turturro, Patricia Arquette and Christopher Walken with exciting up-and-comers. At its heart a dystopian take on modern work, it follows four employees: Mark S (Scott), Irving B (John Turturro), Helly R (Britt Lower) and Dylan G (Zach Cherry). They are innies, condemned by their “real” (outie) selves to work at the shady Lumon Industries with no clue what their apparently very important job is for. What the Macrodata Refinement, or MDR, team does at Lumon is one of many unanswered questions in the show (others include: who is “the Lumon board”? And why is there livestock in the office?) but it’s possibly the most pivotal of them all.
“That core question of identity, especially in relation to work, was really at play for so many people when the show first came out,” says Lower (a thoughtful interviewee, more mellow than the frequently wired Helly) of the show’s fortuitous timing. “It just happened to hit the zeitgeist at a time when we as a collective were confronted with questions about our work-life balance, during and after the pandemic.”
Severancemania is in full flow in early December, as the cast Zoom in to meet with international press to discuss season two. An official podcast hosted by Scott and executive producer Ben Stiller has just been announced; Vanity Fair have released exclusive on-set pictures that have sent Reddit into meltdown; and dedicated fans are wondering how and where additions such as Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie will slot in to the new episodes. The fanfare is all the more impressive when you consider that Severance has been off screen far longer than it has been on it. Indeed, we are only just now – in January 2025 – being treated to that second season, with production delays (including rumoured tension between its showrunners) and the Hollywood writers’ strikes having left the series adrift for the best part of three years. It would be tough for fans of any hit show to wait so long, but with one this good – and which ended season one on a cliffhanger – the wait has been nothing short of torture.
An unexpected consequence of that unbearable wait, however, is that it has become a true word-of-mouth hit, prompting a fervent online following, much fan art (“That’s when you know people are very, very invested,” says Cherry, who shares an easy chattiness with his character) and a rumoured $200m budget for these 10 new episodes, a figure that puts it into TV’s big leagues alongside the likes of Netflix’s Stranger Things and HBO’s House of the Dragon. These days, production emails are written in code, and scripts are under lock and key. “Ideas were closely guarded [for season two],” adds Scott, who, like Mark, is warm and slightly self-effacing. “Which was also weird, because we had been working on the show for years, and nobody gave a shit at all. And suddenly it was this thing!”
Creator Dan Erickson describes himself as “a locked box” when it comes to letting details slip, even to his family. It doesn’t stop people from trying. “My landlord will occasionally come by to do a repair, and he’ll be like: ‘So, you know – what’s going on with those goats?’”
If all the waiting around has been tough for fans then it’s worth remembering that cast and creator have had to be patient, too. Scott first got a call about the series from Stiller back in 2017, while Erickson had had it percolating in his brain for years before – perhaps as early as 2012, he says – inspired by previous temp job drudgery (when he was first contacted by Stiller, he was employed as a courier for the food delivery service Postmates, having sent the show’s pilot out as a writing sample while working on the outer fringes of the TV world).
While much of the mystery box series comes straight from Erickson’s impressive brain, fans of the show do give him a run for their money with the creative – and occasionally prescient – predictions they post online. “It’s wonderful [to read the theories],” Erickson says. “I love people’s creativity. It’s not only that they’re taking the time to watch the show – in some cases, multiple times – but that they’re putting their own stamp on it. It adds to the life of it.” However, he says, he does have to be careful not to lean too far into fan fiction. “It can be a little overwhelming, because I’ll read all these theories that are different from what we’re actually going to do. But I’ll be like: ‘Damn it, that’s pretty good. I wish I could make that show, too.’”
In a previous interview with the Guardian, Erickson said that he was keen to avoid some of the errors committed by another ambitious, high-concept drama that left some fairly gaping plot holes over its six-season run. When we speak, he wants to be clear that he doesn’t see Lost as a cautionary tale, but more as a pioneer that had its flaws. “I understand the challenges that that show faced,” he says. “They were learning how to do it as they went, with many, many more episodes a season than we have. But for me, it’s really about planning it in advance. If we set the rules of the world, and we know what the company’s intentions are, and we know what the end game is, that frees us up to play. We can have these funny, strange little diversions, but we know we’re not going to go so far off track that we can’t come back”.
In the six episodes released to press, we get a few possible diversions, not least the fact that Mark’s entire team has been replaced by a brand new gang in the first episode, among them Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat. There’s also a much younger colleague on Lumon’s severed floor, Miss Huang, played by 18-year-old newcomer Sarah Bock (“She hit the ground running,” says Cherry, adding that he’s “excited for people to discover her”). But, for the most part, we continue to follow the original crew, going to deeper, more perilous places, and seeing allegiances and friendships put under new pressure. It is, says Erickson, “the Empire Strikes Back thing, where you want to bring more danger into the mix in chapter two”.
That also means visiting a mysterious and very cold location away from the Lumon office, identified only in those Vanity Fair images as “a frigid new locale”. Cherry says it was a “bonding experience” for the cast to be in such a challenging environment, not to mention the heavy coats and mountain climbing. Erickson, meanwhile, was in LA doing “other stuff for the show, but we got a live feed. So I’m sitting there with a lemonade [going] like: ‘Oh man, Britt looks really cold, I hope she’s OK.’ I felt like a little bit of a monster.”
In keeping with this darker mood, the characters are more intense, vulnerable and volatile this time around. In trying to verify the bombshell he received at the end of season one, indicating that his late wife Gemma may not be gone for ever, Mark puts himself under intense mental and physical stress, Scott explains: “He’s putting everything – all of his resentment for Lumon, and his resentment towards the world, towards his family – everything is going into this effort. He funnels all of that grief, bitterness and anger [into it].” Also in a precarious position is the brilliantly icy Lumon supervisor Mr Milchick, who displays a few more human attributes this time around as he deals with increasing demands in the office. Tramell Tillman, who plays him (and is, in fact, smiley and rather easygoing), says this shift was “freeing … in season one, everything was so controlled. But now, Ben and Dan and I were really talking about how much we wanted to show Milchick’s emotional life.” Lower was also able to dig deeper this time around, as Helly’s innie and outtie personas clash and enter what she describes as “dangerous territory … this one person is waging a war inside of herself.” Meanwhile, Dylan’s innie, Cherry says, has been thinking of himself as this “swashbuckling playboy” up to now; in season two he learns about his struggles, “which makes him rethink who he is, and who he wants to be.”
The visual language of Severance is as important as ever, and the claustrophobia imparted on the audience by the retro-futuristic, maze-like Lumon headquarters doesn’t abate. It’s also a crucial element of how the cast get into character, says Scott. “You walk in and the set does half the work for you,” he says. “Because you’re in a completely different, off-kilter world, under those fluorescent lights”. Walking down those endless corridors for 12 hours a day on set, says Tillman, you can almost start to feel like an innie. Lower agrees, looking pained: “We’re in these sterile environments with low ceilings and pharmaceutical lighting and golf green carpet.” Luckily, though, the mood on set is never low. “I think there’s an incredibly healthy balance of hard-working people who also really like to play,” she adds. “There’s a lot of levity on set.”
Milchick and co could definitely take a leaf out of their book, but maybe there are things they could also borrow from their fictional overlords. Although he’s not prone to dropping hints about where the series is heading, Erickson admits that he’s “a naturally careless and forgetful person. I’ll print out a document that has some big spoiler, and then I’ll have to remember, like: Oh, I can’t leave that out, it’s got to go in the shredder. We could learn a thing or two from Lumon in that way.”