“There is an end point.” Creator Dan Erickson on Severance S2 and beyond

“I had a job I didn’t like, and I was walking into work one day and just found myself being like ‘God I wish I could just jump ahead, and suddenly it was 5pm and I could have done the work but not have to experience it!’” remembers Dan Erickson, creator of workplace Apple TV+ sci-fi drama, Severance, which is just about to start its highly-anticipated second season.

The show follows Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott), who leads a team at the mysterious Lumon Industries, and whose employees have undergone a severance procedure that surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives. 

“I was like ‘that’s kind of a weird kind of messed up thing to wish for’, because ideally, we should all want to experience the totality of our lives,” Erickson continues. “There’s limited time we have on Earth, and then the whole thing just kind of came from that. I spent the rest of that day doing no work and just writing down ideas for the show, and I got yelled at, and then eventually left that job. I am a very, very fireable person, it turns out!”

Well, we’re glad he hasn’t been fired from this particular job as the first season of Severance has been a huge success for the streaming service, landing a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and receiving a workload of awards in the process.

The first series of the show saw Mark and his colleagues, Helly (played by Britt Lower), Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry) find themselves at the center of an unraveling mystery at Lumon and its enigmatic founder and work (including goats?!).

The final episode of Season One saw our core four characters eventually rebelling against the severance procedure to see who they are in their non-work lives and find out things – sometimes not-so-great things – about their ‘outie’ person.

With the Season One ending expanding the world of Severence beyond its work place setting, Erickson says it’s been a “challenge” expanding the world into Season Two of the show but that there has also been a “real joy to it”.

“The fun thing about the company is that there’s some ambiguity as to where the company ends and where the cult begins because it does have this weird otherworldly, spiritual quality to it. So we really wanted to continue to play in that world and expand that,” Erickson confirms. “But at the same time as we zoom in that way, we also zoom out in terms of the outie world and see more of those characters’ lives. Then at the same time, we’re zooming in on the characters themselves and go back to the first question you hear asked on the show: who am I?”

Indeed, though we spend the majority of the show with just four characters, apart from Mark we don’t really know anything about them outside of the office. Who are they? And what kind of person decides to undergo a procedure like severance? To help write those characters, Erickson started off the writing procedure with backstories already established for all the characters.  

“Yeah, I had a backstory in mind,” he confirms “Some things changed in the initial writers’ room, and then I worked a lot with Ben [Stiller], Mark Friedman, and Beau Willimon, and we talked about different iterations of it but we mostly stuck with the backstories that I had in mind going back to Season One.”

For Season Two, we’ll be finding out a little more about those backstories as the outside world begins to encroach on the isolated walls of Lumon. 

“The cool thing about it is that you have this implicit question with each severed character, which is, why did they do this to themselves?” Erickson says. “It is a pretty bonkers thing to do to your brain, and something that Ben responded to in the very first episode when I brought it to him, was like, ‘it’s so sad’. There’s this just sad, empty sort of human thing at the center of this, which is why would a character choose to disassociate from themselves in this way? And you have different answers to that question for each character.”

The characters are certainly a mystery but there’s possibly no bigger mystery in the show than of Lumon itself. What is the company actually for? Why is its founder so revered? Seriously, what are those goats for?

“We’ll certainly answer some of the pressing questions I wanted to in Season Two,” Erickson reveals. “I was really adamant that I wanted to not string people along to a point where they started to lose interest. One of the big central mysteries of the show is, what is Lumon doing? What is the end game for this company? Are they a company or a cult or something in between? So that’s something that will be revealed over the course of the whole show. 

“We have answers that lead to other questions and we’re stacking blocks on top of each other, of questions and answers, until ultimately we get to the big answers.”

Phew, we’re definitely not the only ones keen to get our greedy mitts on some of those answers. The internet is absolutely awash with Severance fan theories, something that Erickson can’t help but look into sometimes…

“Every couple of weeks, I will vow to myself that I’m done reading fan theories forever, and I’m never going to read them again! Haha!” he laughs. “[But] I think you do have to be a little bit careful because, first of all, a lot of the theories are great and I find myself wanting to do every version of the show. But at the end of the day, I have to stay true to my particular version of it. I try not to read them because I think you can get overwhelmed by them, but it’s hard because it’s so much fun. 

“Also the fan art is so cool. So much of it is so impressive and beautiful, and it just makes me feel so good that people are not just taking the time to watch the show, but then adding to it via these awesome creative endeavors.”

Speaking of watching the show, Season Two will be out this week and Erickson tells us that one of the things he’s really looking forward to audiences seeing is “Gwendolyn Christie’s character – that is a fun, wild, strange, beautiful character. I had to pinch myself for a week straight once we knew that we had Gwendoline for it. 

“That’s one of the ones I think people should be excited for. But there’s more where that came from!”

It certainly sounds like Lumon has many more mysteries in store for us, but they’re not infinite and Erickson confirms that does have an idea for the series as a whole. “I have an end point,” he confirms. “I have elements that I want to hit along the way, but it’s more of connecting the dots thing than it is a strict road map. You have to let the show be alive, and you have to let the show surprise you. Sometimes the show decides which way we’re going to go, because all of a sudden you see a performance, or you see a detail that you didn’t expect to fall in love with, but you do. And then it’s like, well, we have to follow that. We have to see where that goes.”

 We have to ask, then, what was one of those surprising elements that Erickson ended up exploring on the show? “The goats!” he laughs. “I always knew that that was going to be an intriguing question and that people were going to want to know the answer but that’s what 90% of people ask me about. What are those goats and are they okay? You’re not going to hurt the goats, right? So it’s clear that that’s an element of the show that people are really interested in. 

“But I felt the same way! Once we saw it, once we were shooting it, I was sitting there looking at the monitor, and I was like, ‘we have to follow this up’. This has to be something that we spend some time with because it’s just too much fun not to.”

Yes! We knew it would get back to the goats. 

The second season of Severance will debut globally on Apple TV+ with the first episode on Friday, January 17, 2025 followed by one episode every Friday through March 21.

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