“Severance” season two seems to have hit another snag. Production on the show’s next installment has screeched to a halt in New York amid the ongoing writers’ strike, Deadline reported on May 8.
Just a few days earlier, star Zach Cherry had confirmed that filming was in progress and said “things have been going good” in a May 4 interview with Entertainment Tonight. While Cherry didn’t give away much information at the time, he said that when reading the second season’s script, “My reaction was the same as my reaction was to the first script in season one, which is, ‘This is good!'”
“Severance” season two may have already experienced some setbacks, as in late April, Puck News reported that it had been delayed partly due to animosity between showrunners Dan Erickson and Mark Friedman. However, Ben Stiller, an executive producer and director of season one, responded to the reports with a statement clarifying season two was still going full speed ahead, per TVLine. “We’re on the same really slow schedule we’ve always been on. Same target air date we’ve always had,” he said, adding that “we all are just working to make the show as good as possible.”
Back in January, series star Patricia Arquette gave fans an ominous warning about season two. “Be scared, very scared,” she said, per IndieWire. “I think these guys have been working really hard, and come up with a lot of really creative things. They have a whole world in their minds. They just let us in, piece by piece, into what’s going on, but I think it will be fun and beautiful.”
Ahead, check out what else we know about “Severance” season two so far.
“Severance” Season 2 Plot
Season one ended on a dramatic cliffhanger so it’s likely that season two will pick off where that left off. “There’s definitely going to be some expansion of the world,” creator Erickson teased in April, per Esquire, saying the show will continue to explore its central corporation, Lumon, which requires employees to sign away their memories of their work lives after clocking out. “Within Lumon, we’re going to see more of the building, and we’ll see more of the outside world, too,” he said. “There’s an overall plan for the show. I have an end point in mind, and I intentionally didn’t plan it season by season, because I wanted it to be flexible enough that we could get there in two seasons or six seasons. I want to allow us to be surprised by where the show goes. There’s a sense of what Lumon is trying to do and the role that our main characters are going to play in that, and where it all will culminate.”
Erickson also told Entertainment Weekly that season one will focus on the lives of more Lumon employees outside of work. “The first season was an ensemble piece at work, but it was much more focused on Mark (Adam Scott) on the outside, obviously,” he said. “We wanted the audience to experience Mark’s life through his perspective, and he has no idea who Helly (Britt Lower) and Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Cherry) are on the outside; his whole context for them is work. So we wanted to tell it in that way for season 1, but in season 2, we’re going to be showing all of these people on the outside. Similar to Mark, they each had their own reason for getting this procedure, and they’re all at some stage of a healing process for one thing or another.”
Stiller also shared a few vague plot details with Deadline in April. “I think it’s important for fans of the show to know that the unanswered questions do need to be answered at some point,” he said. It’s just, I think we feel this responsibility to do it in a way that is both responsible and entertaining.”
“Severance” Season 2 Cast
Scott, Lower, Cherry, Arquette, Turturro, Dichen Lachman, Jen Tullock, Tramell Tillman, Michael Chernus, and Christopher Walken will return in season two. The new season will also welcome eight new cast members: Alia Shawkat, Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Wever, Bob Balaban, Robby Benson, Stefano Carannante, John Noble, and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, per ET.