Mark Scout: Last News

Showtime’s , on Apple TV+ is the latest puzzle box series to capture the fascination of critics and fans alike. And after eight episodes, season 1 of the workplace thriller from creator and writer Dan Erickson and director and executive producer Ben Stiller has come to a shocking close with a finale that left star Tramell Tillman screaming.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterSPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Good News About Hell” and “Half Loop,” the first two episodes of “Severance,” which premiered Friday on Apple TV Plus.The Ben Stiller-directed “Severance” debuted its first two episodes Friday, revealing a fictional world where people, like Adam Scott’s Mark Scout, are able to undergo a procedure that allows them to mentally separate their work and home lives. Why a person would choose to do this and why Lumon, the company that created the process, would require it of some of its employees is just the start of the questions posed by the initial pair of “Severance” episodes.“What we know of them is that they are a med-tech company.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer“What is it we actually do here?” That’s a question posed by Adam Scott’s Macro Data Refinement department head Mark Scout in the new Apple TV Plus series “Severance,” a show about Lumon Industries, a mysterious company whose employees, like Mark, have undergone a surgical severance procedure that gives them a very literal “work-life balance.” It’s also a question that series creator Dan Erickson, director Ben Stiller and stars Scott, Patricia Arquette and Tramell Tillman found themselves asking a lot during the making of “Severance.”“The jumping off point is so fascinating, and there are so many interesting questions set up by it,” said Stiller, whose Red Hour Productions picked up the script from Erickson and brought it to Apple. “It was a question of, where should we go tonally with the show? Because we didn’t want it to go to a familiar place, necessarily.” Stiller went on to say that “because the tone was so unique,” and had a “strange humor about it,” the creative team really wanted to establish the “rules” of “Severance’s” world and “that’s what a lot of the time was spent doing.”“Severance” showrunner Erickson first got the idea to create this world while he was working a stereotypical 9-to-5 job that had him wishing he could block out that part of his day entirely.“I worked a string of office jobs when I first got to L.A., and one in particular was in this weird little windowless office,” Erickson told Variety.