The highly anticipated second season of Severance arrives in January, and creator Dan Erickson and executive producer and director Ben Stiller have offered a peek behind the curtain at the new episodes.
An exclusive interview with Vanity Fair features plenty of tidbits from Erickson and Stiller about what to expect from Season 2 of Severance. Exclaim! previously gave the show's first season a 10/10 review.
Among them: the core Innie team of Adam Scott, Britt Lower, John Turturro and Zack Cherry take a "field trip to a snowy landscape" where "things get weird"; Alia Shawkat, Stefano Carannante and Bob Balaban will play members of a rival macrodata refinement team; and Gwendoline Christie's character is "doing some kind of work where she's not in an office."
"I think things get darker," Erickson offered when asked about the new season's direction. "We very much wanted to put our heroes in a scarier place because Season 1 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 2 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."
Stiller added, "When [Season 1] came out, it was fun to look at all of the reactions and how people would kind of dig into theories. We wanted to pick up the story where it left off. We're bringing the Innies to the Outie world and then will answer some questions by the end of the season. Hopefully we keep it enough of a mystery and intriguing enough that people want to keep following the story."
The interview notes that the finale of Severance's first season aired in April of 2022. Stiller explains of the time between, "It took a while to write Season 2. 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 seven 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."
"On a practical level, it's a very intricate show. Each character has two lives — essentially, two personalities — and we are expanding," Erickson shares. "For me, the writing was the most painstaking part of the process because there were so many ways we could go. And 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."
Severance Season 2 premieres January 17, 2025, on Apple TV+.