The Severance writer and cast on corporate cults, sci-fi, and more

The first season of Severance walked the line between science-fiction thriller and Office Space-like satire, using a clever conceit (characters can’t remember what happens at work while at home, and vice versa) to open up new storytelling possibilities.

It hinted at additional depths, but it’s really season 2’s expanded worldbuilding that begins to uncover additional themes and ideas.

After watching the first six episodes of season two and speaking with the series’ showrunner and lead writer, Dan Erickson, as well as a couple of members of the cast (Adam Scott and Patricia Arquette), I see a show that’s about more than critiquing corporate life. It’s about all sorts of social mechanisms of control. It’s also a show with a tremendous sense of style and deep influences in science fiction.

Corporation or cult?

When I started watching season 2, I had just finished watching two documentaries about cults—The Vow, about a multi-level marketing and training company that turned out to be a sex cult, and Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God, about a small, Internet-based religious movement that believed its founder was the latest human form of God.

There were hints of cult influences in the Lumon corporate structure in season 1, but without spoiling anything, season 2 goes much deeper into them. As someone who has worked at a couple of very large media corporations, I enjoyed Severance’s send-up of corporate culture. And as someone who has worked in tech startups—both good and dysfunctional ones—and who grew up in a radical religious environment, I now enjoy its send-up of cult social dynamics and power plays.

When I spoke with showrunner Dan Erickson and actor Patricia Arquette, I wasn’t surprised to learn that it wasn’t just me—the influence of stories about cults on season 2 was intentional.

Erickson explained:

I watched all the cult documentaries that I could find, as did the other writers, as did Ben, as did the actors. What we found as we were developing it is that there’s this weird crossover. There’s this weird gray zone between a cult and a company, or any system of power, especially one where there is sort of a charismatic personality at the top of it like Kier Eagan. You see that in companies that have sort of a reverence for their founder.

Arquette also did some research on cults. “Very early on when I got the pilot, I was pretty fascinated at that time with a lot of cult documentaries—Wild Wild Country, and I don’t know if you could call it a cult, but watching things about Scientology, but also different military schools—all kinds of things like that with that kind of structure, even certain religions,” she recalled.

She gave an example of how that framework informed her view of the character:

Even in her sleep clothes when she’s Sevig, it’s like a nod back to when she was a little girl, and you cover your neck, you cover certain part of your body in modesty. So it was fun coming up with this history and where things began and what they’re referencing.

By incorporating these influences, Severance ends up being not just about bad work/life balance and manipulative corporate leadership—it’s about all kinds of mechanisms of social control.

Erickson said he hopes more people will see the themes about how people in power can sometimes divide in order to conquer. “They do [that] on a personal level literally with severance because they know that the more you divide up a person’s mind or consciousness,” he explained.

Season 2 further explores this idea as it introduces more departments to the mix. Season 1 had some hints at that—for example, the paintings and mythology depicting different departments rebelling, where the content varied by department. On moving beyond severed individuals to focus more on severed social groups, Erickson added:

You see that also play out on a wider level on the floor with the different departments, because they’re literally keeping them physically separated, and then they’re also seeding distrust. And I think there’s something to take from that in terms of, you know, that those in power will often try to divide up a populace, turn them against each other, get them fighting each other so that they’re not noticing what’s going on above their heads.

A new layer of dramatic irony

Of course, what makes Severance special is the first example: the dramatic opportunities created when this divide-and-conquer framework is applied not just to social groups but to a single individual.

There are only a few other shows or films that have explored the idea that when a person’s memories are severed like this, you end up with the emergence of two distinct identities—and those identities might end up having conflicting goals or desires. When I asked actor Adam Scott how he approaches playing a severed character, he said:

It’s interesting because they’re the same guy, it’s just different parts or sections of the same person. Particularly in season two, as their interests start to differ a bit, they become more and more separate, and I guess playing it, I do treat them as sort of separate characters—but always remembering that they’re just different sort of sections of the same person.

The longform format of a prestige TV series allows for a richer exploration of this kind of role than, say, relatively short feature films that have touched on it before. Severance works as well as it does because it’s a slow burn.

“I feel like there’s really room to stretch out in one way or the other, for lack of a better term, and work my way through the story,” Scott said on that point. “I’ve been at this a while and often had roles where I had to squeeze so much into a small amount of screen time, and with Mark, his journey is pretty gradual.”

Because they live in a bubble they can’t see outside of, corporate employees in the show are relatively easy to manipulate and control. But they often test the boundaries and outwit their captors in unexpected ways.

Erickson said that he and director Ben Stiller looked to the 1998 Peter Weir film The Truman Show for inspiration here. Like that film, Severance flirts with being a science-fiction story without adopting all the trappings.

Digging into the show’s influences

When asked about the show’s influences, Erickson didn’t stop with The Truman Show. “The Truman Show is another thing where you’re like, ‘Is that sci-fi? Kind of. There’s tech in there that doesn’t really exist,” he said. “But from that to The Matrix to Dark City to Brazil, Being John Malkovich… all this stuff sort of came into the soup.”

He said he and Stiller mixed ideas and approaches from those science-fiction films with everything from The Office to Office Space. He also said Stiller put special emphasis on a sci-fi thriller called The Conversation.

When I asked him if he considers Severance science fiction, he was happy to accept the label.

“I do consider the show science fiction, even though it doesn’t always feel like that. To me, I’ve always had a pretty broad definition of science fiction, and I don’t think that it’s just one thing. What I love about the genre is that it can be very, very grounded. It can be something that feels like it could be five years from now, or it could be space lasers, and both are cool,” he said.

Aesthetically, Severance reminds me of the video game Control, so I asked if it factored in, too. Scott said:

I am familiar with Control, and I’ve taken a look at it. It wasn’t something I knew of before, nor was The Stanley Parable, which people have also sort of compared [Severance] to. But both of those, I’ve looked at since then and I totally see it. I think that a lot of the interesting storytelling that is being done today is being done in games, and so to me it’s cool—even though it wasn’t intentional on my part—it’s cool to be compared to stuff like that. I think it is the hugest possible compliment.

As a longtime Star Trek fan, I found an aesthetic parallel in Severance: the characters are always traversing nondescript corridors, akin to those on the USS Enterprise (but much more unsettling). On The Next Generation, the show’s producers, directors, and production designers got a lot of mileage out of shooting or decorating one very small hallway set in creative ways. I brought that comparison up to cott and asked him if it was a similar situation.

He said it wasn’t:

There are many, many hallways that we’re working with, and in season two, there are even more. Ben built even more hallways for us to walk down, and they seem to never end, and they’re always being shifted around for different patterns or depending on what we’re shooting, so it’s very easy to get lost in these hallways, and you hit dead ends. It can be frustrating.

But at the end of the day, it’s great because we get to shoot these long oners where we’re walking down hallways for an extended period of time, and we don’t have to cut because we have lots of hallway. I wonder if we could measure at some point and find out just how many miles of hallway we have built.

I opted not to include any spoilers in this article since the season is still airing, but I will say this after watching six episodes of season 2: I think it’s just as good as season 1. The world retains its air of unsettling mystery, even as some questions are answered, and its scope expands beyond just a couple of offices. The story takes some unexpected turns, and if you’re into this Lost-style “big mystery” type of show, there’s simply nothing better on the air right now to scratch that itch.

Season 2 began on Apple TV+ on January 17 and airs new episodes weekly. There will be 10 episodes in the season.