‘Severance’ Creator Wants Future Seasons to Reflect Hollywood Strikes and ‘Fighting for a Better Situation’
It may have taken three years for Season 2 of “Severance” to finally come to fruition, but now that it’s finally streaming, creator Dan Erickson can’t help but dream of what’s next.
After Season 1 introduced viewers to the offbeat, sinister world of Lumon Industries, the Innies that make up its workforce, and the Outies compartmentalizing their lives, Season 2 is now unfolding deeper, stranger intricacies that speak to how corporations deal with dissenters. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Erickson shared how he’d like to expand on this narrative even further by using his experience of walking the picket line during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA Strikes.
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“When we do think about continuing the show — if we are able to do that — we can’t help but think about things like the strikes, and what it was like to be on a strike line, and what it was like to be fighting for a better situation,” said Erickson. “It can’t help but affect our thinking as we continue to think about the show.”
Other shows have started wading into this conversation, like the “Abbott Elementary” arc involving Philadelphia’s public transportation workers at SEPTA going on strike. When it comes to “Severance,” however, Erickson isn’t looking to plan too far in advance.
“I know the big answers. The really big stuff I’ve known from the beginning,” he said to THR. “There are deviations along the way in terms of how you get there. I’ve been lucky enough to talk to a lot of other showrunners, people who have done this before, and the common thread with those people is that it’s a tightrope. You can over-plan, and if you over-plan, your show can end up losing some of the spontaneity that makes it exciting, and you can feel like you’re just trying to tick boxes. If you under-plan, then you can end up painting yourself into a corner and not knowing how to get out. It’s a balance.”
Erickson also recently spoke to IndieWire’s Proma Khosla, discussing the “sophomore dread” of not being able to recreate “Severance” Season 1’s success with Season 2. However, once shooting finally began and he was able to see fully-edited sequences, he quickly realized that this was an opportunity more than it was a challenge.
“All of a sudden it wasn’t about ‘Are we going to screw this up?’” Erickson told IndieWire. “It was about, ‘How much cooler can we actually make this, and can we turn it into something even more exciting than what was there before?’ Having seen the whole thing, I really, really feel like we did.”
“Severance” Season 2 is currently streaming on Apple TV+ with new episodes dropping every Friday.
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