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Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘What if this doesn't work?' The ‘Severance' cast reflects on Season 2's biggest swings
On Feb. 18, 2022, Apple TV+ unveiled 'Severance,' a striking new series set at Lumon Industries, a mysterious biotech company whose employees in the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) division have undergone a procedure in which their at-work consciousness (known as their 'innie') is 'severed' from their personal-life consciousness (their 'outie'). Over the next two months, audiences obsessed over the show's seductive examination of work-life balance and the different guises we wear throughout the day. Then the series went on an agonizingly long hiatus — and not just for fans. 'Our No. 1 concern was people sticking with us after a three-year break,' admits star and producer Adam Scott. 'We stopped shooting about a year ago — I've been spending all of that time either watching cuts of the show or discussing the show with [executive producer] Ben [Stiller] and [creator] Dan [Erickson]. 'Severance' is a constant in all of our lives. Whether we're shooting or not, we're always in close contact talking about it.' That angst is apparent when I speak to Patricia Arquette, who plays Lumon's icy, menacing Harmony Cobel, the day of the shocking Season 2 finale. 'How's it going?' she asks excitedly about the online response. Relieved that fans hail 'Severance's' sophomore run as more provocative and moving than ever, she confesses, 'I was scared of some of the risks [the creative team] were taking: 'What if this doesn't work?' They really didn't sit on their laurels from the first year's success — they took a lot more chances in the second year.' Because of the outsize anticipation, initial reports of delays and extensive rewrites on Season 2 created worries that the series' intricate narrative puzzle might implode. Scott dismisses those reports now that audiences have seen the finished product. 'It's a unique show,' he says, 'and in Season 1 we were figuring out what it was as we were doing it. In Season 2, the show was changing and expanding — we were figuring out what it was all over again because it was important to all of us that it not feel the same. Sometimes it takes a while.' Certainly, the show's emotional stakes are raised. Dichen Lachman, who plays Ms. Casey/Gemma, is especially proud of this season's heartbreaking seventh episode, 'Chikhai Bardo,' which flashes back to Mark and Gemma's once-blissful time as husband and wife, their relationship affected by miscarriages and IVF treatments. Lachman felt responsible for ensuring 'Severance' properly conveyed the anguish of infertility issues. 'I have not been through the process of IVF, but I just know [from] speaking to my friends how difficult that is,' she says. Without getting into specifics, she says, 'I've had things happen. It is very shocking — you do think that there's something wrong with you. It's a difficult thing to talk about — and it's very difficult, I think, for a man to understand it on the same level as a woman.' The actors' personal experiences informed the season in other ways. John Turturro's older brother, Ralph, died in December 2022. 'It was hard to go back to work,' says the actor, who plays Mark's Lumon co-worker Irving. But something shifted once the cast headed into the freezing wilderness for 'Woe's Hollow,' an episode that finds the MDR division engaged in a bizarre team-building exercise. 'When I was up in the mountains, it just felt like I was invigorated,' Turturro recalls. 'It was also arduous, being in the snow — [my character] had a lot to do and I was very active. But along the way, I felt myself being able to incorporate it. You're surrounded by trees and snow, and it was beautiful. You could contemplate a little bit and look out at the sky. I was appreciative of that.' For Tramell Tillman, whose breakthrough performance as the eerily formal Lumon manager Mr. Milchick was among the first season's revelations, the series' central themes — especially the unknowability of one's 'true' self — continue to hit home. Reflecting on his journey to come out as gay — he was raised Baptist — Tillman says, 'I've always admired people that were consistently the same, no matter the circumstance. I think me being able to become a chameleon is just a condition of growing up and who I am — that kind of malleability has afforded me a lot of opportunities. But I never as an adult walked away from the true essence of who I am — I never wanted to step away from my values. That took a while for me to learn: What is it that I believe in?' Living multiple lives is also something Zach Cherry, who provides both comic relief and pathos as fellow data refiner Dylan, understands. The actor long knew he wanted to be a performer, but initially he had to get a day job. 'I was an office manager,' he says. 'It wasn't quite as distinct as the innie/outie, but they didn't know that I was doing comedy every night. I wasn't that version of myself [at work] — I was compartmentalized in that sense, so that informed what I did on this show.' Cherry was at the job 'for quite a few years,' but where other actors are quick to dismiss their earlier 9-to-5 gigs, he proudly declares, 'It was a job that I did enjoy. I was good at it! But it very much was not my passion.' Since this season's finale, which sees Mark abandon his outie's wife, Gemma, to run away with the anarchic Helly, Britt Lower, who plays the character, has observed fans' impassioned response to that cliffhanger. But she won't answer a question many viewers have: What, exactly, is Helly thinking when she looks at Gemma just before she and Mark escape? Does she feel bad for Gemma? Or is she feeling triumphant that Mark chose her? 'It's a Rorschach test of how it resonates with a viewer based on their own experience,' Lower says of her character's neutral expression. 'I would never want to rob someone of their interpretation. I will say that a woman simply looking across the hall at another woman can be interpreted in so many ways.' As for what awaits viewers in Season 3, the 'Severance' castmates are uniform in revealing nothing. 'I'm just excited to see where they go,' Lower says. 'For the time being, it's really fun to let my imagination run wild.' Throughout her career, she has taken to drawing to help enter the headspace of the characters she's played — has she done any sketches about what Helly's future might look like? Lower sparks to that suggestion. 'Not yet,' she replies, 'but maybe next time we talk, I'll have some drawings to show you.'
South China Morning Post
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Can Severance keep viewers on Apple TV+? Why platform is banking on workplace thriller
Apple TV+ has a huge hit on its hands with the workplace thriller Severance. Advertisement Even though its second season has concluded, fans will probably flock to various Reddit channels to decode the puzzle-box-style show and discuss the fate of the Macrodata Refinement team at Lumon Industries. For Apple, the question is whether it will be able to cash in on Severance's momentum. Unlike Netflix , which has amassed a content library of thousands of titles, Apple TV+ – with only around 270 shows – has prioritised quality over quantity. So far, however, Apple has struggled to attract and retain subscribers despite the popularity of comedy-drama Ted Lasso and critical praise for thriller Slow Horses Now, thanks to shows like sci-fi drama Silo, comedy-drama Shrinking and Severance, there are signs that might be starting to change. Severance was the fifth-most streamed original show across all platforms during the second week of February, racking up 681 million minutes watched, according to the most recent ratings data from audience measurement company Nielsen.
Buzz Feed
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
After THAT Finale, We Can't Stop Thinking About 'Severance' Season 3 — Here's Everything We Know So Far
Following an excruciating near-three-year wait, Apple TV+ finally delivered the second season of Severance in January. We all returned to the offices of Lumon alongside Mark S., Helly R., Dylan G., and Irv, where Mr. Milchick ascended the ranks as the floor manager of the severed floor, and the work of the MDR department remained nothing short of mysterious yet important. Buuut, after the "Cold Harbor" finale last week, we certainly got some of the answers that we've been looking for after two whole seasons. Just hours after airing, Tim Cook and Ben Stiller confirmed that Apple TV+ had ordered a third season of Severance. Praise Kier! View this video on YouTube Theories are running rampant online surrounding the direction of the show in the next season. But before we dive into what we know about season 3 of Severance, let's recap what we learned in the season finale. Ms. Cobel finally reveals the sinister operations at Lumon and Mark's significance to the company. He has been instrumental in creating multiple consciousnesses for his wife, Gemma, who is alive and held captive as Ms. Casey. Mark's task, including the Cold Harbor file, involved refining data clusters that corresponded to these personas, effectively constructing new identities for use within Lumon's severance program. And "Cold Harbor," the highly discussed file throughout the series, is finally revealed to be the final test in the Macrodata Refinement project that creates new consciousnesses for Gemma, Mark's wife, as part of Lumon's experiments to test the severance chip's ability to suppress core emotional responses. And seemingly, the end of Gemma Scout's existence as we knew it. Calling back to "Chikhai Bardo," the baby crib in the Cold Harbor room serves as an emotional trigger related to Gemma's past miscarriage, and her dismantling of it without emotion demonstrates the chip's effectiveness in erasing deeply ingrained trauma. Meanwhile, we got to see Innie Mark and Outie Mark share their first conversation together. While it was kind of heartwarming at first, it didn't take long for things to take a turn once Innie Mark realized that he, along with the rest of the Innies at Lumon, might not exist if Outie Mark had his way. Of course, this episode took us through a serious and violent journey that saw Mark catching a body (I'm still wondering how a court would hold an innie accountable...), finally finding Gemma, and sadly, abandoning her at the last minute (as his Innie) so he could remain inside Lumon with Helly R. Speaking of Helly R., as part of this plan to take down Lumon and save Gemma, she led the revolt on the severed floor that saw her and Dylan G. imprisoning Mr. Milchick in a bathroom. We also have to mention that creepy look on her face at the end of the episode that spurred theories that it was actually Helena Eagan. The ending gave much more closure than the cliffhanger of season one (and a stellar marching band performance led by Tramell Tillman), yet there are still many more questions that need to be addressed. Without further ado, here's everything we know about season 3 of Severance. The good news: we probably won't be waiting another three years between seasons. A few factors played into the delay between the first and second season including the writers and actors strikes in 2023. So it seems like everyone is hopeful that the next season of Severance will be back in the near future including both Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller. "I would love to finish the show before I'm 70," Erickson told Entertainment Weekly. "I would hope that season 3 comes sooner," he continued. "Certainly a big part of it was the fact that we had the strikes which shut us down for five or six months for production. And there was a difference between that and being shut down for Covid in season 1, because when we were shut down for Covid, I was still writing that whole time, and this time literally it was pencils down. I was making an effort to not even really look at or think about the scripts during that time." He added, "... Having done it twice now, there is more of a sense of understanding procedurally what works and how to streamline it, so our goal is never to draw out people's pain for three years. And I hope that we don't have to do that again." Hopefully, 2026? Even better, Ben Stiller already confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter in February that they were working on the new season in a writers' room, adding that he hoped that we wouldn't have to wait three years between seasons, again. Speaking of writers' rooms, it appears that they've recruited new showrunners for the third season, according to Nexus Point News. Per the Writers Guild of America database, Eli Jorne (Walking Dead) and Mary Laws (Succession) will be joining Erickson for the third season, replacing Chris Black and Mark Friedman, who served as showrunners in seasons 1 and 2. There isn't a whole lot of information surrounding the plot of the upcoming season or what might happen to Mark and the gang after breaking Gemma out of Lumon. However, as pointed out by Harper's Bazaar, the final shot of the season finale strongly indicates what's to come in season 3. Apple TV+ "For me, that image was just in my head from the beginning — when we said, OK, we're going to go this far and this is where we're going to take it,' Stiller told Indie Wire. 'You don't see freeze-frames at the end of movies that often these days, but it used to be done a lot more. It's just kind of this moment in time where you're like, 'Oh, wow, this is the end of the movie, but it's going to keep going. We just don't know where it's going to go.'" The most important question is, who will be making their return? Adam Scott suggested that we might see the whole crew back on screen again, which makes sense. After all, the last time we saw Dylan G., he rallied the Choreography and Merriment department against Milchick while Mark S. and Helly R. ran off. Apple TV+ "I couldn't be more excited to get back to work with Ben, Dan, the incredible cast and crew, Apple and the whole 'Severance' team," Scott said in a statement announcing the show's renewal. However, a key question surrounds the return of Irving, played by John Turturro. By the end of episode 9, Irving boards a train with his dog, Radar, after Burt (Christopher Walken) spares his life and tells him to never return to Kier again. It could be the end of Irving's story as we know it but there's a chance it might not be. "When you're doing scenes at the end of the season, it's always tricky to find that sweet spot," he told The Wrap about that emotional scene at the train station with Burt. "Because you think it could be the end, but it maybe it's not the end." What's a bit more promising is that Turturro said he's in "open" conversation with Stiller and Erickson about what could come next. "If there's stuff that's good and active and interesting to do, then I could see that, yeah,' Turturro said. 'If people wanted there to be [a third season], there could be, and there could be big, big surprises too. You know, Irving's left all those paintings behind. There's a reason why they went into his apartment, why they're looking around.' Although details on the plot of Severance season 3 are still under wraps, the wait for answers is already unbearable. Does outie Mark reunite with Gemma in the outside world? Will Milchick survive the revolt of the innies at Lumon? And how deep does the rabbit hole go? Share your best theories below.
NBC News
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- NBC News
'Severance' season 2 finale leaves 'outies' with another cliffhanger — and season 3 is on the way
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the show "Severance." A goat, a marching band and a big decision. "Severance", the Apple TV+ series that has become a cultural phenomenon, ended its second season Thursday with another major cliffhanger. The finale provided answers — or at least some semblance of clarity — around many major questions, but the future of the show's main characters (both innies and outies) remains in doubt. Fans can take some solace in Apple's announcement Friday morning that the show will return for a third season. By far Apple's biggest streaming hit, the show has generated a sizable viewership as well as a cottage industry of internet sleuthing and memes. "Severance" was among the top trending topics on X on Friday morning. And much like the first season, "Severance" waited for the last scene to throw its biggest curveball. Just as it looks like Mark Scout (Adam Scott) will be able to escape Lumon with his wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), his "innie" makes a startling decision: to stay inside the building and with his own love, Helly R. (Britt Lower). The decision marks a turning point for the show. While the combative dynamics between the innies and Lumon remain, the growing tension between the innies and outies on the show is poised to become the primary source of conflict — between Mark S and Mark Scout, and between Helly R and Helena Eagan. It's a split that is already showing some signs of fracturing fans who are inclined to root for either the innies or the outies. Some fans were moved by the grand gesture from Mark S. 'SEVERANCE IS A LOVE STORY,' wrote one X user, with an image of the final shot. As has become common for "Severance" fan reactions on the internet, the memes flowed. The sci-fi series follows a group of workers at fictional Lumon Industries who have undergone a so-called severance procedure, permanently dividing their consciousnesses between their work and personal lives. 'Innies' and 'outies' have no memories of the other's life. Fans have become captivated by the show's dystopian premise, as well as the cohort of 'innies' that make up Lumon's dedicated Macrodata Refinement (MDR) team: Mark S. (Adam Scott), Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), Helly R. (Britt Lower) and Irving B. (John Turturro). Throughout season two, all of the members grapple with their existence as they learn more about their 'outies.' Mark Scout (the outie of Mark S.) secretly begins 'reintegration,' a painful brain surgery process that would meld his 'innie' and 'outie' in order to try and remember his experiences as both. It's all part of an effort to find his wife, Gemma, who was thought to have died in a car accident two years prior but is actually being experimented on by Lumon employees somewhere in the building. The season two finale revolves around 'outie' Mark's mission to save Gemma from the depths of Lumon. Thanks to help from his sister, Devon (Jen Tullock), and former severed floor manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), Mark Scout is able to make an appeal to his "innie," Mark S. Their conversation — conducted via recorded messages back and forth on a video camera — becomes heated. Mark S. shares his reluctance to save someone he doesn't actually know, especially because Gemma's reunion with Mark Scout would likely mean the lives of all 'innies' (including his love interest, Helly R.) will come to an end. Back on the severed floor, Mark S. decides to fulfill his outie's request after all. Helly R. and Dylan G. help by distracting floor manager Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), who has thrown a celebration featuring 'choreography and merriment' — a particularly surreal scene featuring an animatronic version of Lumon's mythological leader Kier Eagan and an extended performance from a marching band — to commemorate Mark S.'s completion of his work. Mark S. makes his way to the testing floor where he becomes his "outie," Mark Scout, and reunites with Gemma. They escape to the severed floor, where 'innie' Mark S. escorts Gemma to a stairwell to help her leave Lumon for good. But rather than go with her, Mark S. ends up choosing to stay behind with Helly R., and they run off, hand-in-hand, down the hallways of Lumon as Gemma looks on screaming Mark's name. 'NEVER. LET. YOUR. WIFE. STOP. YOU. FROM. FINDING. YOUR. SOULMATE. #severance' another fan wrote. 'MARK AND HELLY WOULD RATHER LIVE IN HELL THAN A WORLD THAT DOESNT INCLUDE EACH OTHER. this is romance!!' another X user wrote. But others were outraged he would choose navigating the unknowns of the severed floor with Helly R. instead of letting his 'outie' be with Gemma. 'mark being able to walk towards helly with gemma screaming like that on the other side of the door is actually so black hearted and evil … he will never deserve her #severance' wrote one fan. 'i just don't understand how anyone could look at someone screaming and crying like gemma was and go nah bye.. mark s you will pay' wrote another fan. 'i love markhelly but honestly… it's not the same to me now,' added another X user. 'they're almost turning into the villains themselves. i don't want them to find love and freedom and humanity in this way, you know?' Aside from the dramatic twist at the end, the season 2 finale also revealed one mysterious aspect of the show that fans had been speculating about since season 1: What exactly are the MDR employees doing for Lumon? According to Cobel, Mark S. and the team have been refining Gemma's four tempers, creating 25 different consciousnesses — or innies — of her. In Gemma's storyline, it appears each of her consciousness' experiences is personal to her outie's tempers in some way, as Lumon tests the limits of the severed chip on the company's quest to fulfill Kier Eagan's imagined world without pain. The countdown to Season 3 begins Since the show returned in January after a three-year hiatus, fans have inundated platforms like X and Reddit with memes, theories and even fan-cam edits. The massive fandom has helped make 'Severance' Apple TV's biggest hit, with millions of people tuning in week after week. Ben Stiller, a director and executive producer of the show, has assured fans that there will not be as long of a hiatus between season two and three as there was between seasons one and two. 'No, the plan is not to [wait three years],' Stiller told Travis and Jason Kelce on an episode of their podcast, 'New Heights.' 'Hopefully we'll be announcing what the plan is very soon.' During a recent appearance on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live,' Stiller also teased that the creatives behind the series 'know what the ending is, but how we're getting there is the creative process.' In the meantime, fans will have to sit tight — though that may be easier said than done. 'More Severance please…NNNNOOOWWWWW!!!!!!!' wrote 'The Daily Show Host' Jon Stewart, tagging Stiller in a post on X. '(but actually thank you for what we got!)'
Bloomberg
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
Season Finale Is a Culmination of Workplace Angst
Halfway into the eighth episode of Severance, one of the show's main characters is rewarded with a 'Waffle Party' for being a top performer. It's the highest perk available to the staff of Macrodata Refinement — the Lumon Industries department that employs the series's protagonists — and includes both fresh waffles and a sensuous dance performed by figures dressed as the four tempers: dread, woe, frolic and malice. Modern work, Severance seems to argue, is both a prison of pressure and a theater of the absurd. The artful exploration of that dichotomy has earned Severance, which airs its Season Two finale on Apple TV+ on Thursday, glowing reviews and several Emmys. But the show's true genius is in how it builds on the history of office life in fiction, television and movies — revealing a growing mistrust between employees and the executives who define their worth and dictate their work/life balance.
