‘Severance’ Creator Dan Erickson ‘Excited’ About Season 2

The surprising finale of Severance, Season 1 has spawned lots of, if not hundreds of theories. The present facilities on a team of workers who volunteer to have their workplace reminiscences surgically remoted from their private ones. Mysteries abound. Who’re these workers, after they’re not within the workplace? Why would they be prepared to endure such a drastic step? Why would the company that employs them, Lumon, ask them to do it?

Many followers have naturally taken to Reddit to take a position about the place the eerie present is headed. Ben Stiller, who directed the primary season, mentioned in the course of the Severance panel at San Diego Comedian-Con on Thursday that he has but to determine learn how to get on Reddit—however the present’s creator, Dan Erickson, has been on the platform studying fan reactions.

“I used to be warned to not go on the Subreddit on this present in any respect, and I held off for about six minutes,” Erickson mentioned, “after which I used to be on it day-after-day for some time. It’s sort of addicting.”

Erickson has been engaged on the script for ten years, and Stiller has labored with him for 5. So whereas the story shouldn’t be written in stone, the pair have robust notions about its route. “It’s actually attention-grabbing to see what individuals’s theories are and generally they’ve concepts which can be higher than what I considered,” Erickson mentioned. “However then I pulled again as a result of it’s this concept of infinite choices, and in some unspecified time in the future it’s worthwhile to decide to what you’re doing.”

He mentioned he even discovered an extremely correct map of Lumon’s labyrinthine hallways on the web site. (Throughout the panel, star Adam Scott mentioned these corridors, constructed as an actual set, had been so maze-like that he usually wanted assist to get out.)

No plot giveaways for Severance Season 2

Erickson revealed that, within the authentic model of the pilot, Adam Scott’s character Mark was the one waking up in an workplace after being severed, and Helly (Britt Decrease) was the particular person coming in to examine on him. However the author and director determined to flip the roles in order that Helly grew to become the severed human freaking out concerning the new state of affairs after waking up from her surgical procedure.

Throughout the fan Q&A, somebody identified that the lads in Severance appear glad being severed—their workplace selves get pleasure from pursuing company targets and enjoying with finger traps. However the first girl who’s severed within the present doesn’t cope with it effectively and finally leads a riot. The fan requested what Stiller and Erickson supposed to say about gender variations at work.

“It wasn’t a straight-up intentional factor, ‘Let’s have the primary girl within the workplace being the one who upsets the apple cart,’” mentioned Erickson. “However as soon as it was Helly, there’s an apparent factor that should you deliver anybody right into a setting that beforehand was all a method, while you deliver variety into the surroundings, you will have new concepts launched that assist. So this concept that it was a boy’s membership and Helly was an instigator of change for the higher—we leaned into it.”

The inventive workforce mentioned the way forward for the present solely in broad, thematic phrases. Stiller mentioned the query of how a lot the “innie” variations of characters within the workplace can sense about their “outie” lives at residence will proceed to be a serious space of exploration. “One of many conversations we had quite a bit with the actors, nearly in each scene, is how a lot of what’s happening on the surface is informing their innie, even when they’re not acutely aware of it,” he mentioned.

Erickson added that he needs to present a bigger sense of the world past the Lumon workplaces.

He mentioned that he deliberately wrote a few world that solely differed from our personal insofar because the severance process existed. Future seasons will additional discover ramifications of how dividing one’s character might have an effect on society at massive. “I’m excited, going into Season 2, constructing out the world a bit of bit extra and with the ability to see, with this one slight tweak to actuality, what the totally different ramifications could be,” he mentioned. “We didn’t need it to really feel sci-fi within the classical sense. We needed it to be far more grounded.”

Each author and director remained in any other case tight-lipped after they had been requested about particular plot factors for Season 2. A fan requested concerning the child goats that, considerably randomly, appeared in a room in Season 1. “Is there a significance to the goats and can or not it’s revealed?”

Erickson answered, merely, “Yeah.”

Write to Eliana Dockterman at [email protected].