Acclaimed workplace genre-bender Severance goes deeper and darker in season two

It has been more than two years since the “innies” at Lumon Industries, a group of office workers whose “perceptual chronologies” are “split and spatially dictated,” were able to breach their corporate prison and connect to life outside the windowless maze they have been confined to. In the final moments of the first season, widower Mark Scout (Parks and Recreation’s Adam Scott) realized his wife is alive and spends her days roaming the same soul-crushing white corridors he does. But, perhaps most alarmingly, Helly (Britt Lower), the newest addition to the “innie” crew, who since the beginning has relentlessly questioned and criticized the program run by their secretive company, realized she is, in fact, its steward.

Leaving viewers hanging on these show-altering cliffhangers is something series creator Dan Erickson initially didn’t intend to do. “In my original plan for season one, we were actually going to take the story a little bit further and maybe provide a little more temporary closure for people,” he says. “It was [executive producer and director] Ben Stiller who said, ‘That part where Mark says, ‘She’s alive,’ I think that’s the end of the season.’ I was like, ‘Oh, Ben, people are going to be very angry at us if we do that.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

Frustrated, sure, but not so angry that fans won’t tune in to see what happens to Mark, Helly, Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry) after the overtime contingency shatters their worldviews. “For Lumon, it’s embarrassing, and they’re going to respond in a way that is dangerous,” Erickson teases. “They now feel challenged and threatened by the actions of the innies. The question is, what’s the fallout and the ramifications of it? That’s going to take us to a darker place.”

For the innies, this is their first real victory against the company, but what does that mean? “We are going to find ourselves still at Lumon, but it’s a very different reality now,” says Erickson. “The first season, we picked up with these characters in their day-to-day routine. And now, that routine has been completely blown up. You can’t do something like what they did and just go back to arguing over group photos and pencil erasers and finger traps. It necessarily changes the game. But the thing about being an innie is that every day that you show up [at work], you’re plunged into it without context. You never get to know what situation you’re about to walk into when you walk into that office, and that’s what makes it so scary.”

For Mark S, who made the decision to undergo the “severance” procedure after the death of his wife, the realization that she is still alive is earth-shattering in many ways. “The revelation that Ms. Casey [Dichen Lachman] is his wife really messes with him, especially when you consider that he has this burgeoning romance with Helly and he is experiencing the joy of first love,” says Erickson. “That gets obliterated by this revelation with Ms. Casey — who is a person I don’t think he would’ve seen himself connecting with in that way. It’s confusing and disorienting.”

But it is Helly who suffers the most horrifying realization of them all, when she discovers she is Helena Eagan, daughter of Lumon CEO Jame Eagan, who is responsible for their fate underground. “In the first season, every time she thinks that somebody is the true enemy, she finds out that there’s another enemy behind them. Mark is the first character that she thinks is the face of the company. Then there’s the board, and, at the end, there’s her,” explains Erickson. “She saw herself as someone who is there to burn this place to the ground . . . Learning that she’s burning her own house down, it’s going to make her question, ‘Am I as evil as the people that I’ve been trying to take down? And how much of that is intrinsic to me, even though I’m an innie?’ It’s devastating for her, and the worst news she could possibly have gotten.”

According to the man behind it all, the second season will visually expand this already disturbing world. “As you get into darker themes and the characters start to learn darker and darker truths about the company, you convey that by the aesthetic of it getting stranger and more hostile,” Erickson promises.

But the creator also understands that for fans to want to continue down the austere path of Lumon Industries, answers are needed. “I want to reward people’s faith that we do know the answers and that the answers are cool and they are going to push our characters into a more interesting and challenging place,” he says. “At the same time, part of the joy of the show is the mystery, and you don’t want to take the air out of that. So, once you orient yourself and realize what’s going on, there’s the question of, ‘What’s going on here?’ That’s the fun of it.”

The season premiere of Severance begins streaming Friday, January 17 on Apple TV+