Apple TV+ has become an unlikely home for innovative and experimental science-fiction series. Over the past few years, it’s covered everything from alternate history to kaiju stories, but by far the most successful of these experiments has been Severance, the modern-day parable that takes work-life balance to the next level.
We’re finally getting a second season two years after Season 1 wrapped up, and we now have our first glimpse of what’s coming up — and it’s exactly as unsettling as you expect.
As part of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the tech giant released a teaser of what’s next for Apple TV+, from blockbuster movies to new series and returning favorites, including Severance. Check out the whole teaser below.
Severance follows Mark Scout (Adam Scott), an employee at the mysterious Lumon Industries who lands a job with such a high level of secrecy that he agrees to be “severed” — having his work personality (the “Innie”) and his home personality (the “Outie”) divided into two separate consciousnesses with two separate sets of memories.
When we left Mark and the other members of Lumon’s workforce, he and other Innies had found their way to the outside world, where they each discovered secrets about their lives before being reverted to their original Outie selves. But it looks like Season 2 will bring the action back to Lumon, as every clip takes place within its disorientingly plain headquarters.
“Welcome back. Been a minute,” villainous supervisor Seth (Tramell Tillman) says to Mark. We also see Mark lying on the table used for onboarding new employees, suggesting we might see a flashback to his first days as a severed employee.
Severance Season 2 has been a long time coming. Behind-the-scenes drama between showrunners allegedly rocked production, although executive producer Ben Stiller later tweeted there was no issue. Regardless of the truth, the series was still stalled by 2023’s dual writers’ and actors’ strikes. Hopefully, Season 2 will be worth the wait. At the very least, we know it won’t be much longer until we can clock back into Lumon.
