It might have taken three years Season 2 of “Severance pay” to finally come true, but now that it’s finally streaming, creators Dan Eriksson can’t help but dream about what happens next.
After Season 1 introduced viewers to the offbeat, sinister world of Lumon Industries, the Innies that make up its workforce and the Outies that carve up their lives, Season 2 now develops deeper, stranger intricacies that speak to how corporations deal with dissent. In a recent interview with The Hollywood ReporterErickson shared how he would like to further expand this narrative by using his experience walking the picket line during 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA Strikes.
“As we think about continuing the show — if we can do it — we can’t help but think about things like strikes and what it was like to be on a picket line and what it was like to be fighting for a better situation,” Erickson said. “It can’t help but affect our thinking as we continue to think about the show.”
Other shows have started to wade into this conversation, like the “Abbott Elementary” arc where Philadelphia’s SEPTA transit workers go on strike. When it comes to “Severance,” however, Erickson isn’t looking to plan too far ahead.
“I know the big answers. The really big things, I’ve known from the beginning,” he told THR. people who have done this before, and the common thread with those people is that it’s a tightrope. You can overplan, and if you overplan, your show can end up losing some of the spontaneity that makes it exciting, and you can feel that you are just trying to cruise in boxes. If you under-plan, you can end up painting yourself into a corner and not knowing how to get out. It’s a balance.”
Erickson also recently spoke with IndieWire’s Proma Khosla, discussing “other horrors” not being able to recreate the success of “Severance” Season 1 with Season 2. But when filming 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 make it something even more exciting than what was there before?’ After seeing it all, I really, really feel like we did.”
Season 2 “Severance” is currently streaming on Apple TV+ with new episodes released every Friday.
