Severance’s creators explain the art of a great cliffhanger

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.”

One of the trickiest parts for Severance, at least early on, was that the team wasn’t really sure how audiences would react. It’s a weird show that follows a group of office workers who have their brains surgically altered to separate their work and home lives. This, in essence, creates two selves: those who live in the outside world (outies); and those who are confined to the basement office of Lumon Industries (innies). Things only get stranger from there, involving everything from an office goat pen to a terrifyingly ominous dance party. While the show eventually found an audience, that wasn’t a given during production.

“We made the whole season in a bubble where nobody saw anything until it was all done, and we didn’t know if anybody would even respond to the show,” says Stiller. “I remember the season 1, episode 8 ending was a cliffhanger. And I remember thinking ‘that’s a really good cliffhanger, I wonder if people are going to feel the episode 9 ending is a good cliffhanger too.’ Will this all add up for people? Luckily it did.”

Scott, who plays Mark on the show and also serves as a producer, echoes that by saying, “It’s a roll of the dice whether or not something is going to work.” The idea is to design the show so that it builds up to those big moments, and then hope it connects the way you planned. “There’s all of this architecture building up to that moment in episode 9,” Scott explains. “I remember when we were shooting the finale, and shooting the scene where Mark walks past [Harmony Cobel, played by Patricia Arquette] and calls her by the wrong name, and talking to Ben and Patricia and just saying ‘If they’re still with us at this point, this is going to be so awesome.’”

Part of what made the season 1 finale work, says Erickson, is that it managed to both answer questions and introduce new ones. It gave viewers an intriguing combination of satisfaction and mystery. For those who haven’t seen it — spoilers ahead! — the ninth and final episode of season 1 has Mark and his coworkers doing something forbidden: entering the outside world as their innie selves. There, they learn all kinds of important information about who they really are. Mark, in particular, discovers that his wife, who he thought was dead in the outside world, is actually living a severed life at Lumon under the new name Ms. Casey. The episode ends right on that shocking revelation.

“With Mark, that final moment of ‘she’s alive,’ in a way it answers one question; the question was always is he going to find out about Ms. Casey, and is he going to be able to send a message to the outside world that she’s down there,” Erickson explains. “We get answers to those. But then it opens up this whole new question of what now? How is that going to change the status quo on the inside and the outside.?”

While the wait was long, season 2 of Severance picks up right after that moment, so you finally get some answers — but of course, there are plenty more in store.