Severance creator Dan Erickson has shared a tantalising detail about the forthcoming new series of the popular workplace thriller.
Starring Adam Scott and Britt Lower as Lumon employees Mark S and Helly, the psychological series sees Lumon staff undergo a procedure called “severance”, which divides their work and home lives completely in a daring experiment to find a work-life balance.
This means that the “severed” employees navigate through life as two distinct people with no knowledge or memory of the other.
The first of the Apple TV + series was released in 2022 to strong approval from critics, and the forthcoming second series – out on Friday 17 January – has already received overwhelmingly positive reviews.
Erickson said that he enjoys spending time looking at fan theories about the meaning of the show but revealed that so far no one has got it completely right.
“I love all of them and some of them are kooky, but the show is kooky, so it makes sense,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
“I would not say that I’ve seen anybody get it totally right. We are trying to lay down the seeds of where it’s ultimately going, and I do think that people notice that.
“‘They said this in episode 2, and so I bet that’s going to pay off in this way,’ and sometimes that lines up a little bit with what we’re doing. But I don’t think that I’ve seen anything where I’m like, ‘Oh God, they got it. Time to leave the country and change my name.’”
Admitting that has to “police” himself as he spends a lot of time on Reddit, he explained: “I would just do that all the time and spend my whole life looking at people’s theories and seeing people’s fan art.“
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He continued: “And I do, up until the point that it starts to get me in my head. I’ll see a theory and I’ll be like, ‘That’s such a good idea, I wish that we were doing that,’ but at the end of the day, we know what we’re doing and the job is just to continue in that story.”
Severance season two is released on Friday 17 January.