Severance turned out to be a major cult-hit for Apple TV+ in its freshman season earlier this year – and fans can’t wait for the already-announced Season 2 to arrive. However, what made Severance compelling was its mystery-thriller story arc; at the same time, for that mystery to keep delivering its thrills, it can’t drag on too long – there must be a point to it all, and there must be a well-paced timeline, as well. So how long will Severance go on?
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Ben Stiller served as the director of Severance Season 1: in a new interview with THR, Stiller addresses whether he and the other members of Severance’s creative team have an endgame for the series already mapped out. According to what Stiller says, they indeed do.
“Dan Erickson, who created the show, has so many ideas about where the show is going. We always knew that it had to keep going. There’s no closure, but we felt like hopefully the audience would be engaged enough that they would want to have another season,” Stiller says about the end of Severance Season 1.
At the same time, while Stiller admits that there was the simple drive to keep Severance going beyond Season 1, the team behind it also have a clear stopping point in mind, as well – if only to avoid the pitfalls that other series have fallen into:
“What I’ve noticed is that people bring a lot of their own feelings about other shows that didn’t answer questions or kept kicking the can down the road. We were really aware of that and wanted to make sure that we knew the answers to questions. By the way, to you who’ve been doing these shows for multiple seasons, my hat is off to you,” Stiller says. “This is my first experience in multiseason series. It’s so much work. And you see how the audience is watching every moment and every detail. It’s a responsibility. So going forward, we are going to answer questions and pose new ones, but there definitely is an end point for the show that Dan has in mind.”
Severance was one of smartest TV or movie productions done during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sparse, open sets of the show fed intensely into the sci-fi mystery elements of the story, and the limited cast and crew needed worked towards keeping a tight focus and framework around the story. That’s all to say that even as restrictions ease, and budgets increase with the sophomore season, it’s good to know that the makers of Severance are keeping that tightness and focus in mind, and hopefully apply it the same way going forward.
At the moment, Severance feels like it has at least a three-season arc to it (four MAX), which seems to be a standard run for a successful Apple TV+ series. What do you think?
