Ben Stiller & Dan Erickson Explain ‘Severance’ Season 2 Delays: “It’s Worth It”

deadline.com:

Nearly two years after the show debuted, the wait for Severance‘s return is nearly over. With Season 2 of the 7x Emmy-nominated Apple TV+ sci-fi series premiering Jan.

17, creator Dan Erickson and EP/director Ben Stiller explained that the Hollywood strikes were only partially to blame for the delays. “It took a while to write season two,” Stiller recently told Vanity Fair. “Then we started to shoot in October of 2022, and we got shut down by the strike in May [2023].

At that point, we had completed about 7 of our 10 episodes, and then we had to regroup after the strike. It takes us a while to prep the show.

And so, we didn’t start shooting until January [2024]. Then we shot from January to May to finish the last three episodes.” As Erickson explained, Severance is “a very intricate show” with many of its characters living double lives, thanks to the show’s fictional technology that allows corporate employees to surgically divide their memories of their work and personal lives. “Each character has two lives—essentially, two personalities—and we are expanding,” he said. “For me, the writing was the most painstaking part of the process because there were so many ways we could go.