Severance (TV series)

• 1. Introduction

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  Severance, the American television series created by Dan Erickson, began with a man in an office who wished he could "skip the eight hours of the workday, to disassociate and just get it over with". Erickson had finished a master's degree in television writing and was working at a door factory. He was going through a period of depression, and the job felt so monotonous that the wish would not leave him.

  That wish became a science fiction psychological thriller, executive produced and primarily directed by Ben Stiller. It asks what happens when a company grants the wish literally. Who is the person who sits at the desk all day and never remembers going home? What does the person who goes home owe to the one left behind? And what kind of employer would want its workers divided in two?

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• 2. The Procedure

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  Lumon Industries, a sinister biotechnology corporation, sits at the center of the series. Its employees can undergo a procedure called severance, which splits a person's memories between work and private life. The result is two identities sharing one body. The "innie" has no knowledge of the outside world. The "outie" lives a full life beyond the building and knows nothing about the job.

  Mark S., played by Adam Scott, is a former history professor who now works in the Macrodata Refinement department, known as MDR. Outside the office he is Mark Scout. The pattern repeats across the cast. Dylan G. is Dylan George, Irving B. is Irving Bailiff, and Burt G. is Burt Goodman.

  Kier Eagan, the late founder of Lumon, is worshipped inside the company with cult-like devotion. He appears throughout the series in sculptures, paintings, and audio recordings, and Marc Geller plays him. The current CEO of Lumon is Jame Eagan.

  Harmony Cobel, the manager of the severed floor, lives a double life of her own. Outside work she uses a false identity as Mrs. Selvig, Mark's next-door neighbor. Mark's best friend in MDR, Peter Kilmer, known as Petey, left Lumon under mysterious circumstances.

  The company's ambitions reach beyond its own corridors. Angelo Arteta, a state senator backed by Lumon, supports legalizing the severance procedure.

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• 3. The Severed Floor

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  Zach Cherry plays Dylan G., a severed MDR worker who particularly enjoys company perks. Britt Lower plays Helly R., a rebellious new arrival in the same department. John Turturro plays Irving B., a stickler for company policy who is drawn to Burt. Christopher Walken plays Burt G., head of the Optics and Design division, who is drawn to Irving in return.

  Over them stands Tramell Tillman as Seth Milchick, the Deputy Manager of the severed floor. Dichen Lachman plays Ms. Casey, the wellness counselor. Outside the building, Jen Tullock plays Devon Scout-Hale, Mark's sister. Michael Chernus plays her husband Ricken Hale, an eccentric self-help author.

  Season 2 widened the floor. Sarah Bock joined as Eustice Huang, a young new Deputy Manager. Gwendoline Christie plays Lorne, who runs the Mammalians Nurturable division. Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat arrive as Mark Wilkins and Gwendolyn Y., new MDR members from Lumon branch 5X, alongside Stefano Carannante as Dario Rossi.

  In January 2017, Stiller invited Adam Scott to star. The two had worked together on Stiller's 2013 movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where Scott also played an office worker. Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, Jen Tullock, and Zach Cherry were added in January 2020. Tramell Tillman followed in February 2020, and Turturro and Walken in November 2020. Dichen Lachman was cast that December.

  Turturro said he recommended Walken for Burt because he had known him for "a long time and I don't have to really act like we're friends". Stiller himself planned to play a doctor in the first season. He dropped the idea because it did not feel right, and he said he was happy to stay off-camera. He did give an uncredited voice to an animated version of Kier Eagan.

  The season 2 cast was announced on the 31st of October 2022. Stiller offered a voice cameo in that season to former U.S. President Barack Obama, who declined. Keanu Reeves took the part instead, voicing an animated Lumon building in a Lumon industrial film.

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• 4. Origins of an Idea

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  In 2015, Erickson submitted his pilot script to Red Hour Productions, Ben Stiller's company. The development executive Jackie Cohn and the then head of creative Nicholas Weinstock passed it along to Stiller. He read it at least five years before the series premiered, and he called the project "the longest thing I've ever worked on". He also enjoyed what the story added to the genre of workplace comedy.

  Erickson's early drafts were far stranger. They contained stray elements with no backstory, including a disembodied pair of legs running past Mark, a charred floor of burnt desks, and a woman trapped in a glass cubicle. Erickson credits Stiller with grounding the show. In Erickson's words, Stiller felt the concept was weird enough that you did not need "a bunch of other Terry Gilliam-esque bells and whistles". Stiller, Erickson says, "fell in love with the part of the show that was this weird human sadness of a person who would willingly do this to himself."

  The influences came from many directions. The Backrooms creepypasta and the 2013 video game The Stanley Parable fed into the writing. So did the films Office Space, The Truman Show, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The Black Mirror episode "White Christmas" and the comic strip Dilbert belong on the list too. Older echoes include the existential hell of Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 play No Exit and the totalitarian dystopia of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. For its look, the series drew on the films Brazil, Dark City, and Playtime. Erickson's siblings inspired some of the characters.

  Erickson tied the story to his own years in offices, dealing with increasingly insane requests. He said employees are "the ones who are expected to give and give and give, with the understanding that this is a family". That frustration, he said, is where the show was born.

  In 2016, the pilot screenplay appeared on the Blood List survey of the best unproduced genre screenplays. In November 2019, Apple TV+ gave the project a series order. Stiller had been attached to direct only the pilot, but as the series entered development he decided to direct more episodes.

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• 5. Building Lumon

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  Production designer Jeremy Hindle built Lumon from corporate looks of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. He cited the modernist architect Eero Saarinen as an influence on the building design. That influence included the John Deere World Headquarters in Moline, Illinois, and the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex in New Jersey. The Holmdel complex supplied both the exterior shots and the ground floor interiors for Lumon. Hindle described both buildings as "work designed to do work".

  The main sets went up on soundstages in The Bronx. One stage held around 140 feet of hallway that the crew rearranged, with special effects, to make a maze. A second stage held larger hallways, which appeared in the later episodes of the first season. A third space housed main rooms such as Macrodata Refinement, a large room with a low ceiling meant to feel confining.

  Hindle also saw that room as a playroom for the newest hires, so he gave it green carpeting against the white surroundings to suggest grass. Other spaces drew on the work of M.C. Escher or carried objects designed by the German industrial designer Dieter Rams. In a 2025 interview, Hindle said the show has "a Dieter Rams look to it."

  The parking lot carried the same idea. The team sourced a collection of 400 cars, mostly commonplace boxy vehicles from the 1980s and 1990s in good condition. Erickson said the mixed eras were meant to "give a slight sense of disorientation" and make Lumon "feel unmoored from time and space". Individual cars were chosen to reveal character. Mark drives a Volvo S90, Cobel a Volkswagen Rabbit, Helena a Lincoln Continental, and Milchick a Royal Enfield motorcycle.

  All office equipment carries Lumon branding. Prop designers rebuilt old computers with working trackball devices, so the actors could perform the work on screen and settle into the office. The machines have no escape key, a metaphor for the innies' lack of control. They were modeled on 1970s Data General Dasher terminals, and Signature Plastics, maker of the original keycaps, recreated them. In 2025 that keycap set was re-released as "SA Macrodata Refinement".

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• 6. Filming and Frames

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  The COVID-19 pandemic postponed the planned March 2020 start of production. Principal photography on the first season began in New York City on the 8th of November 2020, under the working title Tumwater. The opening scene was shot on the 6th of January 2021. The crew spent a few days in Nyack, New York, filming the homes of Mark and Cobel, then worked in Kingston and Beacon in March. In April they moved to central New Jersey, mainly the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex. Filming was scheduled to finish on the 23rd of June 2021.

  The second season began shooting in New York City on the 3rd of October 2022 and was set to wrap on the 12th of May 2023. On the 8th of May 2023, the writers strike shut the production down. By the 13th of May filming had resumed, with work taking place in Newfoundland. Both the actors strike and the writers strike then halted it again. Filming resumed on the 29th of January 2024 and wrapped on the 23rd of April 2024.

  Jessica Lee Gagné was the primary cinematographer for season 1 and much of season 2. Her key inspiration was Office, a photo book by Lars Tunbjörk, full of claustrophobic or melancholic images of sterile workspaces in Stockholm, Tokyo, and New York in the late nineties. In the innie world, cool fluorescent overhead light heightens a sense of exposure and surveillance.

  Gagné often frames shots through doorways or partly behind walls and desk dividers. These frame-within-frame compositions hem characters in and add to the feeling of imprisonment. She said her "style is based on a kind of gritty realism," and she keeps the compositions clean so the environment does not become overdone.

  The surreal main title sequence came from the designer Oliver Latta, known as Extraweg, and the typographer Teddy Blanks, using computer animation. The title sequences for seasons 1 and 2 won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Title Design in 2022 and 2025.

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• 7. Praise and Prizes

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  In 2025, Severance became the most watched series in the history of Apple TV+. Critics were warm toward both seasons. Rotten Tomatoes puts the overall approval rating at 95%, and Metacritic gives the series 85 out of 100.

  The first season holds 97% on Rotten Tomatoes from 117 reviews, and its consensus calls it "the complete package". Metacritic gave it 83 out of 100 from 36 critics. Lucy Mangan of The Guardian rated it five out of five, praising Stiller's direction, the writing, and the cast. Carly Lane of Collider and Ben Travers of IndieWire each graded it an "A". Kristen Baldwin of Entertainment Weekly wrote that Tramell Tillman "is an absolute force of charisma as Milchick".

  The American Film Institute named it one of the ten best television programs of the year. Critics' year-end lists for 2022 placed it first at Decider, Little White Lies, and Vulture, where Jen Chaney made the pick.

  Season 2 earned 94% on Rotten Tomatoes from 228 reviews and 87 out of 100 on Metacritic from 46 critics. Alison Herman of Variety gave it a perfect rating. John Nugent of Empire gave it four stars out of five.

  Across the run, the series collected 41 Primetime Emmy nominations. The first season drew seven major nominations at the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards and seven more in the Creative Arts categories. It won two Creative Arts Emmys, one of them for its original dramatic score.

  The second season drew ten major nominations at the 77th ceremony and 17 Creative Arts nominations, making it the most-nominated series at both. It won three acting awards. Britt Lower took Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series and Tramell Tillman took Outstanding Supporting Actor. Merritt Wever, who plays Dylan's wife Gretchen George, won Outstanding Guest Actress. Five technical awards followed.

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• 8. Beyond the Screen

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  On the 14th of January 2025, three days before the season 2 premiere, Apple TV+ rebuilt the Macrodata Refinement office inside a glass box at Grand Central Terminal. Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, and Tramell Tillman stepped inside and worked their Lumon jobs for about two and a half hours. The public response was largely favorable.

  The campaign had started years earlier. Season 2 was teased at an Apple Event on the 7th of September 2022, with a clip featuring Helly. First footage arrived on the 10th of June 2024. On the 9th of July 2024, a post on the Apple TV+ account on X showed a light blinking the word "tomorrow" in Morse code. The next day Apple announced a premiere date of the 17th of January 2025. The first trailer followed on the 23rd of October 2024.

  The season ran from the 17th of January to the 21st of March 2025, after season 1 aired from the 18th of February to the 8th of April 2022. Episodes were promoted for Fridays but reached American time zones the Thursday evening before, at 9:00 pm ET.

  On the 21st of March 2025, IKEA India and Australia posted an advertisement for office supplies arranged like the Macrodata Refinement room. On the 26th of March 2025, Scott, Lower, Tillman, Cherry, and Christie appeared at Tower Bridge in London, where balloons carried Scott's face. The same day, Apple added a Lumon Terminal Pro to its website. It was never actually for sale.

  The story spread into other formats. Apple Books released the epistolary novel Severance: The Lexington Letter, framed as a dialogue between a former Lumon employee, Margeret "Peg" Kincaid, and her innie. It also released The You You Are, a fictional self-help book from the series, with an audiobook read by Michael Chernus as Ricken Hale. An official podcast premiered in January 2025, hosted by Stiller and Scott. The first season reached Blu-ray and DVD in the UK on the 2nd of December 2024, in Australia on the 4th of December, and in the United States on the 17th of December.

  Apple renewed the series for a second season on the 6th of April 2022. In April 2023, Beau Willimon was reported as an executive producer and writer for later seasons. A third season was announced on the 21st of March 2025. Eli Jorne and Mary Laws are listed alongside Erickson as showrunners, replacing Chris Black and Mark Friedman.

  In February 2026, Apple acquired the rights from the production studio Fifth Season for an estimated $70 million. Apple Studios will produce from season 3, with Fifth Season staying on as an executive producer. Fifth Season had weighed moving the shoot to Canada because New York was late paying tax credits. Apple's backing lets filming stay in New York, with a start expected in mid-2026 and Kogonada as the new producing director.

  At the time of the deal, six season 3 scripts were written. Deadline Hollywood reported that a fourth season was considered "a lock". Erickson and Stiller have also considered prequels, spinoffs, and foreign adaptations.

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