Dan Erickson Had Nightmares About ‘Severance’ Season 2: ‘I May Have Cried a Little Bit’

Erickson told IndieWire: "I was like, 'Oh my god, it's 'Severance.' It's still 'Severance.' We were somehow able to do it again."

Three years later, Dan Erickson still has no problem remembering the joy and relief he felt when “Severance” premiered.

“I knew that I loved it and saw it as something special, but I wasn’t sure it was going to become any kind of a widespread hit,” the series creator told IndieWire ahead of Season 2’s premiere. “When it hit the way it did, I was elated, but then also felt this sense of sophomore dread of not being totally sure if I could replicate it.”

Season 2 premieres on January 17, but the reviews are literally already in: certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and universally acclaimed on MetaCritic, an IndieWire Critic’s Pick that IW’s Ben Travers described as “deeper, darker, and worth the wait.” But back then, as the confetti settled on Season 1, Erickson faced down a path more daunting than that one dark hallway at Lumon: how to do it again.

“We hadn’t yet proved that this was something that we could do more than once,” he recalled. “We hadn’t proved it to anybody else, and I hadn’t proved it to myself as a writer, so it was a time of great anxiety for me, to be totally honest… The second time around, there’s more pressure, and people expect you to be smarter and wiser, but you’re still the same idiot you always were.”

The night before production started, he had a nightmare that actor Zach Cherry called Erickson’s mom to say that her son didn’t know what he was doing (“Zach is the last person who would would ever do that, but maybe that’s why my brain selected him”). The nightmares didn’t persist, but Erickson didn’t truly exhale until he saw the first cut of a full sequence.

“I may have cried a little bit because I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s ‘Severance.’ It’s still ‘Severance.’ We were somehow able to do it again.’ After that, the the imposter syndrome started to go away and was replaced by just this real excitement.”

Director and executive producer Ben Stiller echoed both sentiments: entering the unknown with Season 1 and then the adrenaline of moving forward with Season 2. For star Adam Scott, there was a sense that “Severance” never ended, despite the gap in when it aired.

“We were spending a lot of time talking about the show publicly, doing press, but also we’re always kind of talking about the show and processing the show, and story-wise, what Dan has in mind,” Scott told IndieWire. “By the time we actually started shooting Season 2, I felt pretty prepped and ready to go, because we kind of never stopped working on it.”

Where Season 1 was tasked with extensive world-building, Season 2 dives right in with the (allegedly) immediate aftermath of Mark (Scott), Dylan (Cherry), Helly (Britt Lower), and Irving (John Turturro) using their severed minds to access their outside selves.

“It was really fun and gratifying to get the opportunity to go further with Mark, both the Innie and the Outie, and sort of explore the outer reaches of what we knew about him, pushing the characters — both of them — to new places.”

Stiller said “it was fun to try to push the bounds and to experiment tonally” in a second season buoyed by the momentum of the first.

“Visually, this show has always been pretty specific about the storytelling,” he said. “As much as the words and the dialog are very important to this show, it’s a visual story and we really try to keep on working at that constantly, to try to make it as specific and distinctive to the show as possible, hopefully in a way that’s organic and not trying to do something just to do it.”

For Erickson, the lead up to Season 2 isn’t as mired in uncertainty as when his show premiered back in 2022. Now that he knows “It’s still ‘Severance,'” he can’t wait to share it with the world.

“All of a sudden it wasn’t about ‘Are we going to screw this up?'” he said, reflecting on watching that first full sequence. “It was about, ‘How much cooler can we actually make this, and can we turn it into something even more exciting than what was there before?’ Having seen the whole thing, I really, really feel like we did.”

“Severance” Season 2 premieres January 17 on Apple TV+, with new episodes weekly.