Severance: dive deep into the Apple TV Plus workplace thriller

Rest easy: we don’t have another Lost on our hands. As beloved as that classic mystery box show was, it was equally frustrating for the way it teased big secrets with answers that either underwhelmed or never came. With the mysteries in Severance piling up since its first season, viewers have had every right to be worried they were in for something similar.

But show’s season 2 finale didn’t just show that all of its mysteries, no matter how small or weird, meant something. It did so in an elegant way — neatly connecting disparate storylines together, while also leaving just enough unclear to make for yet another great cliffhanger. And it was all while being weird and terrifying in a very specifically Severance way.

Severance’s season 2 finale debuts on Apple TV Plus today – but don’t worry, there’s still more to come. In a reply to producer Ben Stiller, Apple CEO Tim Cook posted a video confirming the series renewal, saying “Season 3 of Severance is available upon request.”

Even though there was a three-year gap between the release of Severance season 1 and season 2, it doesn’t look like that will be the case this time. While on Jason and Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast, Stiller said “the plan is not” to have fans wait three years for the next season’s release. The filming of season 2 was delayed during the Hollywood strikes in 2023.

As we inch closer to the end of Severance’s second season, there are still a lot of open questions. But it’s also become clear that the show isn’t in a rush to answer them. Whereas many mystery box shows race to their conclusions, speeding through plot points so quickly that it can be hard to keep up, Severance has spent the latter part of this season meandering through flashbacks and spending some quality time with its characters. It’s a slower pace than other prestige streaming shows, but these episodes have helped show just how fascinating a place Severance’s bizarre world is. They’ve also helped set the show up for the finale — and answers — to come.

Spoilers ahead for Severance, up to season 2, episode 9.

Severance has always been a horror story, albeit one set in a mostly generic office. That blandness is a large part of what makes it so scary: underneath the corporate speak, drab decor, and unflattering fluorescent lighting is something very sinister. And in the show’s latest episode, it uses that energy to tap into a new, even more terrifying kind of fear.

Spoilers ahead for Severance, up to season 2, episode 7.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 67, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy Switch week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been watching Black Doves and The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, reading about Lorne Michaels and rodeos and Ben Shapiro, restarting Twin Peaks in honor of David Lynch, wading nervously into Lemon8 and RedNote, catching up on old episodes of Working It Out, and watching altogether too many Balatro strategy videos.

After a long wait, Severance is back. Season 2 premiered on Apple TV Plus on January 17th, more than two years after the first season wrapped up. The wait was particularly hard because of how the season 1 finale ended — a massive cliffhanger that would completely upend the lives of almost everyone in this sci-fi thriller. Cliffhangers are a tricky business. They can help keep viewers interested in whatever comes next, but they can also be frustrating, seeming to withhold information purely for the purpose of keeping people hooked.

Severance has managed this balancing act well so far, and I had the chance to talk to some of the creative team behind the show — creator Dan Erickson, director Ben Stiller, and star Adam Scott — about how they’ve pulled it off. “Honestly it’s just sort of guessing in your mind,” Stiller tells The Verge. “You try to think about what the stakes are that we’ve established, and hopefully you’ve earned it by the end.”

Much of Severance — the sci-fi workplace thriller on Apple TV Plus — takes place in a brightly lit office, with characters huddled over strange computers where they do work they’re told is both mysterious and important. In the show, that work looks a bit like an alternate reality take on Minesweeper, except the characters are attempting to find numbers that “feel scary,” even though they don’t know what that really means — and the cast is largely going through the same experience.

The computers on the show are functional, so when Mark and Helly are moving pixelated numbers around on a screen, that’s something the performers are doing on set. “When you see us, we really are refining numbers,” Adam Scott, who plays Mark and serves as a producer on the show, tells The Verge. “There is actually a way to do it.”

I’m not going to spoil anything because the new season of Severance doesn’t premiere for 10 days. But I want to be clear — the first season of the sci-fi thriller wasn’t a fluke. The Apple TV Plus series burst onto the scene in 2022 with a story about tech workers who were forced to live in purgatory thanks to an experimental procedure that split their brains in two: one who lived a normal life outside of the office, and another who could never leave. It was tense and strange and downright horrifying — and also benefited from largely being a surprise. But even without that, season 2 hits just as hard as the original, pushing further into the dark, weird edges of the Severance universe, while expanding it in fascinating new ways.

Spoilers for the first season of Severance to follow.

We already knew that the tensions and scares were going to ramp up in season 2 of Severance, and the latest trailer provides a deeper glimpse into what to expect — along with teasing answers to some important (and weird) questions.

The show follows a megacorporation called Lumon Industries, which utilizes a new procedure called severance that allows workers to spatially split their brains, creating two selves: one who works for Lumon, and another who lives life on the outside. The new clip shows the return of four Lumon employees — Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry), Helly (Britt Lower), and Irving (John Turturro) — who are back in the office after managing to bridge those two different worlds. However, it’s unclear if they’re actually in trouble for their actions; instead, they’ve turned into celebrities of sorts.

Like a lot of tech companies, Lumon Industries is instituting a return-to-office policy for employees, but of course, this version looks a little scarier than real life. At least, that’s how it seems based on the first proper trailer for season 2 of Severance.

Following last season’s incredibly tense finale, the show picks up with Mark S (Adam Scott) heading back to Lumon to find things a little different than he remembers them, including a number of his coworkers. But some things haven’t changed — namely, the disorienting office hallways and the unyielding intensity of Milchick (Tramell Tillman), who looks intimidating even while holding party balloons.

While new episodes of Severance won’t stream on Apple TV Plus until January, you will be able to own a physical copy of the show’s first season in just a few weeks.

Unlike Mark Scout (Adam Scott) and his fellow Lumon employees who can never entirely go home, Severance’s first season will be making its way to more living rooms after its upcoming Blu-ray release on December 17th. As 9to5 Mac notes, the show is only being released as a Blu-ray at 1080p resolution and won’t be coming out in UHD. The release of the Blu-ray (which is available to preorder on Amazon right now) is timed exactly a month ahead of Severance’s season 2 return on January 17th, meaning you’ll have plenty of time to get caught up before new episodes start dropping.

The “Music Dance Experience” is on its way back. Apple just released the first teaser trailer for the much-anticipated second season of Severance, along with the news that the show won’t be returning until 2025. The first episode will start streaming on Apple TV Plus on January 17th and last 10 episodes.

The short teaser doesn’t reveal much about what to expect in the new season, but according to Apple, “Mark (Adam Scott) and his friends learn the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe.”