Severance season 2 feels like it’s taken forever, but it’s now just one month away. A new interview reveals why the show took so long to return, and a whole lot more about what’s coming in its Apple TV+ sophomore outing.
What to expect from Severance season 2
Vanity Fair has a new interview with Severance’s two creative leads, creator and writer Dan Erickson and director and executive producer Ben Stiller. In the piece, Anthony Breznican dives deep into a variety of details related to the hit series.
Expect to see significant tensions surface between characters’ innies and outies:
new episodes [delve] much deeper into the split identities of its four central leads, whose personal lives have been technologically separated from their workplace memories. That essentially turns each one into two different people, sometimes with opposing interests.
The first season of Severance was pretty dark already, but the show’s creator Dan Erickson is teasing an even darker sophomore outing:
I think things get darker. We very much wanted to put our heroes in a scarier place because season one ends with them poking the bear. They form this little rebellion, and they’re able to achieve a modicum of success with it, but the question with season two was: What happens when the bear pokes back? What’s the fallout of this victory that they had? I think, without giving much away, the fallout is dire.
One season 2 event that may take things in an especially bizarre direction: a Lumon corporate retreat.
Apparently the “core Innie team ventures away from their macrodata refinement department for a field trip to a snowy landscape.”
Stiller teases: “Corporate retreats are interesting. You’re always having to think a few steps ahead in terms of how Lumon is trying to control their employees with their company ethos. There’s other team-building exercises and dynamics that I think ultimately have a different agenda.”
Why it took so long to make another season
When asked about the nearly three-year gap between Severance’s first and second seasons, both Erickson and Stiller chimed in.
The answer is essentially a combination of two things: them being perfectionists who wanted to take all the time they needed to get things right, and also some unfortunate delays from Hollywood’s strikes.
Erickson says:
sometimes we would come up with something that worked perfectly well on paper, and then it wouldn’t be until we got there and we’re shooting it that we realize: This isn’t quite it. We were never willing to let that turn it into something that wasn’t perfect…[We had] entire locations that we were planning to go to. We had already built or partially built them when we realized, ‘Oh, that’s not going to work.’ Those aren’t always fun calls to have with the studio
Stiller adds:
It took a while to write season two. Then we started to shoot in October of 2022, and we got shut down by the strike in May [2023]. At that point, we had completed about 7 of our 10 episodes, and then we had to regroup after the strike. It takes us a while to prep the show. And so, we didn’t start shooting until January [2024]. Then we shot from January to May to finish the last three episodes.
The full interview is well worth a read for fans of Severance.
Severance season 2 will debut with its first episode on Friday, January 17. You can watch the entire first season now on Apple TV+.
What do you think of these new season 2 details? Are you excited for Severance’s return? Let us know in the comments.
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