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If you’ve been drumming your fingers on your desk at work waiting for the second season of Severance, there’s good news: the Lumon Industries staff are clocking back in. On 29 January 2024 director Ben Stiller quoted a post of Adam Scott’s Mark Scout sprinting down a hallway with the phrase “Back to work”.
This is very exciting if you’re one of the people who’ve made the Apple TV+ sci-fi mystery thriller a massive cult hit. If you’re not, become one of those people. Basically: Lumon Industries’ employees have their memories of their daily lives wiped when they arrive at work, becoming ‘innies’; when they return to normality, they have no memory of what happened at work. But as we saw at the finale of season one, all of that is starting to unravel. Now’s a good time for your onboarding.
"It's really exciting to see the response from people who are loving the show – and the level of fan engagement," Stiller told Variety. "It has been a long road bringing Severance to television. I first read the pilot [script] over five years ago. It has always been a multi-season story and I'm really happy we get to continue it. I'm grateful to our partners at Apple TV+ who have been behind it the whole way."
The first season dropped in February 2022, and took its sweet old time getting there. It’s sounding like the follow-up will be roughly as fleet-footed as the first series. The writers’ strike which started in May 2023 and the actors’ strike that followed didn’t help, but Stiller told ET that it didn’t knock the second season back too much. “We're on the same really slow schedule we've always been on,” he wrote on X. “Same target air date we've always had. Love our fans and each other and we all are just working to make the show as good as possible.”
The whole deal with Severance is that very few people know what’s actually going on at any one time, and right now we’re just a bunch of outies looking for clues – but there are a few details to piece together. This is what we know about Severance season two so far.
Who will be in Severance season two?
Along with the returning cast from season one – Adam Scott, John Turturro, Patricia Arquette et al – there have been some very large additions for season two. Gwendoline Christie, Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat are all on board, as are Merritt Wever, Robby Benson, Stefano Carannante, John Noble and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson. Scott hasn’t been drawn on what they’ll all be up to, but said they were “just incredible people and playing really interesting roles”.
Speaking to Deadline during the press tour for Madame Web, he said: "It's really fun and I can't wait for everyone to see it, so I don't have to, like, continue keeping secrets, which is a total bummer. But yeah, there's so much crazy stuff that happens, I just can't wait for everyone to see it."
What will happen in Severance season two?
Given the number of cliffhangers that need sorting out following the season one finale, it's all a complete mystery at the minute. Matt Cherniss, head of programming for Apple TV+, told Variety that this time they’ll “go deeper into this wholly unique world and unpack more layers of Lumon in season two,” but that’s about it. We’ve got very little to go on.
However, there have been a couple of early pointers. Zach Cherry told ET that his reaction to the new scripts “was the same as my reaction was to the first script in season one, which is, 'This is good!’” Thanks Zach. Arquette chipped in too: “Be scared, be very scared.”
When is Severance season two out?
Again, no idea as yet. Optimistically, it might be here by the end of the year, but it’s more likely to be 2025 before we see Severance season two.
