NEW YORK CITY — It was during one of those mid-afternoon bouts of dread in which Severance series creator Dan Erickson first hatched the idea for his workplace thriller.
What about a TV show, he thought as his imagination started to run wild, about a group of office workers who voluntarily went through a procedure to “severe” their work and personal lives.
“I had this situation, and maybe I’m the only one who’s had this problem, but I had a job I didn’t like and I was going into work one day and I caught myself thinking, ‘I wish I could jump ahead to the end of the day and not have to experience the next eight hours,’” the Emmy-nominated writer and producer says with a laugh.
A big fan of Lost, a twisty sci-fi nail-biter that ran for six seasons on ABC, Erickson started to think how that could work and the seemingly endless possibilities that might spring from this idea.
“It would mean there’d have to be another version of me,” he says.
Erickson added layers to the drama by picturing what might happen if he placed these working stiffs in the employ of a sinister company where the true nature of what they did all day remained a mystery.
During every spare moment, he rattled off pages and pages of scripts. “I worked a string of office jobs because it turns out I’m a very fireable person in the corporate setting,” he laughs. “So I worked all these temp office jobs and all of them had these quirks that I pulled from.”
Of course, a great idea is only successful if you can connect with someone who can help you bring it to the masses. Erickson’s first scripts for Severance landed on the BloodList, which is an annual compilation of the best unproduced horror and genre scripts, where it caught the eye of Jackie Cohn, a producer at actor-director Ben Stiller’s production company. Erickson was driving for Postmates when he heard Stiller wanted to meet.
“I put my Postmates down and I went over and met with Ben,” he says grinning. “The rest is history.”
When Severance premiered in February 2022 it became a breakout hit for Apple TV+. A flood of Emmy noms followed, but beyond that, Severance became a much-talked about series, with fans sharing their wild theories online about the bizarre mysteries that lurked behind the walls of Lumon Industries.
It was a “water cooler” show for an era in which many office workers spent their day in front of laptops at home.
The first season followed Mark Scout (Adam Scott) and his colleagues (Britt Lower, John Turturro, Zach Cherry) who have undergone a surgical procedure that has allowed them to divide the memories they have at work from the ones in their personal lives. The nefarious day-to-day tasks these “Innies” fulfil at Lumon remain a secret, and their “Outie” personas have no knowledge of what is going on in their 9-5 lives.
Three years after its surprise ending, Severance returns for its second season this week with Mark and his office mates wrestling with the truth about who they are in real life. Mark will also try to unravel the shocking Season 1 cliffhanger that revealed the wife he is grieving in his “Outie” life (Dichen Lachman) is very much alive behind the closed doors at Lumon.
After the first season landed with no expectations, Erickson was surprised that Severance built such a devoted cult following.
“I really did think it was going to be a much more niche show in terms of who responded to it,” he concedes. “I knew it was something I would like, but I’m a weirdo. I guess I thought some of the straddling of tones and genres would turn some people off, but I was dead wrong. A lot of people liked it.”
Viewers at home were left with a lot of questions about what Lumon is really doing with all those numbers its workers are crunching and how the employees will reconcile their double lives.
The new episodes will dive deeper into the split identities of Mark and his colleagues, as well as their bosses (Tramell Tillman and Patricia Arquette), but it will also delve into the broader purpose of the work they do at Lumon.
Erickson says there isn’t a big board somewhere where the entire series is mapped out. “We have to be so careful with that,” he chuckles. “You never know when someone might walk in and snap a picture of something and all of a sudden the whole show is ruined. But I have it in my head and it’s written down somewhere buried in a box under 10-feet of concrete. There’s a plan for where it’s all going.”
Some of the answers are coming this season — but not every plot thread will be resolved. To prove his point, Erickson brings up two of the show’s minor characters — Rebeck (Grace Rex) and Ricken Hale (Michael Chernus). “I’m curious to see what happens to them,” he says.
But it’s “by design” that Severance won’t solve all of its many puzzles.
“For me I don’t want to walk away from something feeling like it’s all tied up in a bow and there are no mysteries left to be solved. You want to leave still asking questions and still talking about it. I think that’s fun and part of the magic of it.”
The first episode of Severance Season 2 is streaming now on Apple TV+. New episodes stream Fridays.