For American actor Adam Scott,who plays central character Mark S,the initially dutiful section head of a severed work team,the series is a vision of what tomorrow’s uncertain workplace could be. But now that Tesla founder Elon Musk has been hyping Neuralink,his company that plans to use computer chips embedded in the brain to initially help the paralysed move and eventually store memories,Severance no longer sounds far-fetched. After all,Musk’s start-up is ready to start clinical trials with human subjects.
“It’s not a joke. It’s true,” says Scott,whose previous credits includeParks and Recreation,Party Down,andBig Little Lies. “These companies need to keep the widgets going down the line at any cost and want to be more and more ingrained in our daily lives. We’re all those frogs in slowly boiling water with how far we let all of this to go. The world ofSeverance is not far around the corner. Maybe.”
For much ofSeverance,the audience is in the dark. Mark and his team – Irving (John Turturro),Dylan (Zach Cherry),and despairing newcomer Helly (Britt Lower) – don’t understand what they do as the Macrodata Refinement team,have no contact with other departments,and can only fantasise about how their “outies” live outside the office. They are foundlings,and their predicament is revealed with obtuse circumstances and deadpan dialogue. ImagineThe Office rewritten byInfinite Jest author David Foster Wallace.
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“It’s hard to think you could say,‘Oh,this reminds me of David Foster Wallace’ in the days of network TV,” Scott says. “It’s a really smart show that is assuming the intelligence of the audience. It doesn’t talk down to them at all. It was unlike anything else I’ve worked on in terms of how it felt and the degree of difficulty it had.”
“Unexpected” and “challenging” are the words Scott uses often to explainSeverance. The show’s creator,Dan Erickson,was a Hollywood neophyte without a single credit when his pilot script first became the subject of intense interest in 2016. Red Hour,the production company of actor and filmmaker Ben Stiller,took up the project,making a deal with Apple TV. After the signing,Erickson had to finish his shift as a delivery driver for a popular app.
As soon as he started reading scripts Scott was smitten. Mark is an unlikely protagonist,resistant to discovery and scared of his imposing superior,Miss Cobel (Patricia Arquette). Sadness shades his diligence,so that the character feels like a continuation of Scott’s prior roles as a perplexed everyman. Then Stiller told Scott that the actor was Erickson’s model for Mark the entire time the writer was mapping outSeverance.