If there’s a lesson to be learned from “Severance” Season 2, perhaps it’s this: trust the creative process. Three years after its first season and a production process that involved going back to the writers room after filming, Apple TV+, Ben Stiller and Dan Erickson have emerged on top, garnering 27 Emmy nominations on Tuesday — the most of any one show.
“The great thing about the show is that everybody working on it is so passionate. Especially when something takes multiple years to get out, you really want the wait to be worth it, and especially when the audience is so kind and shows such faith in you, you want to reward that faith,” Erickson, who created and executive produces “Severance” and who was nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series, told TheWrap. “The fact that all of the work and all of the challenges and everything yielded something that was this special, it’s a really, really wonderful feeling.”
It makes sense that “Severance” would require some extra time to perfect because there is truly no show like it on television. Erickson’s trippy drama straddles the line between an absurdist fever dream and a takedown of corporate America that’s as ruthless as Lumon Industries is to its workers. After two seasons spent exploring the worlds of Innies and Outies and questioning what it means to be human, Erickson feels he has a much firmer grasp on his series that is so insightful it’s almost beyond words.
“We sort of have made up the language of the show as we’ve gone along, and thus learned it ourselves. So I do feel now like we have a better sense of what is the show and what isn’t the show,” Erickson said. “That said, something we did in Season 2 was we really didn’t want to rest on our laurels or replicate what we had done. By design, the show is always changing and evolving, and we sort of put ourselves in that precarious position on purpose to challenge ourselves to do something a little bit different, a little bit crazy. It’s a self-induced anxiety that we all can’t help but keep putting on ourselves.”
Erickson is in the midst of that “self-induced anxiety” right now as he’s working on writing Season 3. As much as he appreciates the fan art and fan theories, he’s had to step away from both because “it gets in my head a little bit sometimes.”
“The passion people have for the show is really, really humbling,” Erickson said. “That’s my favorite thing. It’s, of course, wonderful to be treated well by critics and everything, but at the end of the day if people are not watching the show and loving it and getting joy out of it, then there’s no point. And you know what? I’ll see pictures that people post from ‘Severance’-themed parties that they have. That, to me, is almost more incredible than anything else that’s happening.”
As for what’s happening with Season 3, Erickson says it’s in a good place. “It’s going great. We’re having a really good time. We have a really wonderful team and some really crazy ideas that I think are going to surprise people,” he teased.
For now, Erickson is celebrating his success and basking in the wave of “27 Dresses” memes friends have been sending him for his show’s 27 nominations. “Multiple people have had that same idea,” he said.
