At a time when any shred of good news is like manna from heaven, leave it to the cultural zeitgeist experts at Apple TV+ to provide it by dropping the premiere of a second season of SEVERANCE. It’s been almost three years since its subscribers first got a glimpse of it and for its rabid fan base it was love at first sight. The original nine episodes built audience and loyalty throughout its initial run and it’s benefitted by being aggressively pushed algorithmically by the platform on the heels of just about every other buzzy piece they’ve released since. And with little library or sports product to otherwise distract them, the show has, if one is to believe the spin coming from their executives, been exposed to many more times its initial audience, making Thursday’s debut all the more of a holiday than anything related to Martin Luther King or even an indoor inauguration.
I had given it a shot in the spring of 2022 and found it to be intriguing but dense, and frankly, at the time I had a far busier travel schedule than I have now. So I confess I left midway through the run. My roomie was much later to the party, but lately he’s been on an Apple TV+ bingefest and can be found almost any time of the day or night plopped in his recliner raving about the consistent level of quality and engagement their portfolio of originals provides. Having worked with many of the architechts of it at Sony, most notably co-heads Zach Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, I already knew they had a penchant for finding quality over and over again. When you add to that the experience and track record of Ben Stiller, who directs the majority of the episodes, it’s practically a recipe for sampling. Still, it’s heartwarming to see him realize this in real time, and in the case of SEVERANCE so much so that he rewatched the nine episodes of Season 1 in just a couple of chili-fortified binges. It prompted me to finish the season myself, so I’m in lockstep with those who are giddy with excitement and theories about what happens next.
For the benefit of you who aren’t already in such a camp, THE NEW YORK TIMES’ prolific James Poniewozik provided some context in his pre/review that dropped yesterday morning:
The first season of “Severance,” back in 2022, put a new spin on the concept of being your own boss. It took us inside the mysterious, blinding-white offices of Lumon Industries, where employees in the “macrodata refinement department” have chips implanted in their brains to partition them between a work self (the “innie”) and an out-of-office self (the “outie”). The outies collect the paychecks and enjoy the personal time, subcontracting the work to their innies, whose identities only activate when they enter the office. As reality appears to them, the instant they clock out, they clock back in.
A group of Lumon innies, led by Mark (Adam Scott), engineered a virtual breakout, activating their consciousnesses in the outside world to expose Lumon’s abuses and uncover its secrets — ending with the cliffhanger revelation that Mark’s supposedly dead wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), was alive and captive as a Lumon employee.
And CINEMABLEND’s Nick Venable hurriedly gushed out his feelings almost immediately after watching S2E1:
One of my biggest TV obsessions has finally returned, with Severance arriving on the 2025 premiere schedule three years after that first season’s cliffhanger had everyone wondering if Mark would actually remember yelling “She’s aliiive!” before being pulled back into his outie’s reality. Answer: he didn’t. But creator Dan Erickson’s team still filled the episode with myriad other answers and new details to gnaw on until the next episode of this critically acclaimed season arrives. Of all the wild and unpredictable quotes, discoveries, changes and introductions on display in “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” what drew my attention the most was Lumon’s bonkers “Microdat Uprising” video that Milchick showed to Mark, Helly, Dylan and Irving as a way of welcoming them back, seemingly months after the events of the previous episode.
So with juicy plotlines like this, it seems just about anyone with enough passion and a platform is weighing in on what might happen next. GAMES RADAR’s Lauren Milici seems to think she’s found an Easter Egg:
(T)he 10th episode of the official podcast might have spoiled a reveal that takes place later on in the season.
On today’s episode of The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott, the two discuss season 2 episode 1 with special guest Tramell Tillman. As first pointed out by a Reddit user, the ad breaks in the episode drops one singular word that is important to the series as a whole that could very well be an accidental early reveal.
Specifically, in both ad breaks for the S2E01 episode of the podcast,” shares Reddit user airgapairgap, “the ads mention that ‘Mark S is attempting reintegration,’ which is a pretty big piece of information that hasn’t been revealed yet as of tonight’s episode.” In the episode’s ad break, Scott says, “In this episode, Mark is having trouble going back to Lumon knowing now about his outie’s life – reintegration and getting settled into this new normal are not easy.“
And ESQUIRE’s Josh Rosenberg threw out a whole bunch more in his piece from yesterday:
Just one click into the r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus Reddit and the flurry of recent activity will make your eyeballs spin around inside your skull. Every shirt color or stray look indicates something to the Internet sleuths trying to solve the Apple TV+ drama’s mysteries.
According to Severance creator Dan Erickson, none of the theories that he’s read so far are correct. “I love all of them and some of them are kooky, but the show is kooky, so it makes sense,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I would not say that I’ve seen anybody get it totally right. We are trying to lay down the seeds of where it’s ultimately going, and I do think that people notice that… But I don’t think that I’ve seen anything where I’m like, ‘Oh God, they got it. Time to leave the country and change my name.'”
Venable offered up another 20 of his own burning questions in his piece. The fact he had so many so quickly should suggest exactly how triggering this show can be.
Poniewozik, as he often is given his stature, seems to own up to having a few answers, but he’s as cagey as Stiller has been:
I have watched all 10 episodes, and there is little that I can in good conscience tell you about what happens in them. To be sure, there are plenty more surprises and confounding details this season: More disturbing Eagan family lore; an enormous conference room/pasture grazed by a herd of goats; and Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), a new manager who happens to be a young child and seems to have wandered off the set of a Wes Anderson movie.
You should question a lot in “Severance.” The series…is the kind of show that invites you to parse, rewatch and sift for clues, to wonder whether every tease will pay off, whether every thread will be tied in a bow, whether the ultimate ending will “stick the landing.”
I know, James. I’m living with someone who embodies every one of the behaviors you’ve mentioned–and we’re only just beginning this latest arc of obsession. And thank goodness for that, if only because it may minimize the amount of FOX News that would otherwise be blaring were it not for Apple TV+ and, in particular, this series. That’s a RTO I’d rather avoid.
Until next time…