Everyone who watched the first season of Severance is keenly aware of how long it’s taken for season two to get here. Part of this is for reasons outside of the show’s control—the writer and actor strikes of 2023 set many a Hollywood production back—and part of it was due to Ben Stiller’s (and seemingly, but to a lesser extent, co-creator Dan Erickson’s) perfectionism. Last month, the duo told Vanity Fair that they would often return to the drawing board, to the point that expensive sets custom-built for the series weren’t ultimately used in the show.
Today, The New Yorker published a profile of lead actor Adam Scott, which again probes the nearly three-year gap since the last season of Severance—one of television’s longest between first and second seasons, the magazine notes. Aside from the delays, it was also just a long shoot: 168 days, according to Stiller. For the mathematically minded, that’s about five and a half months. Accounting for weekends, it’s significantly more than half a year. Scott himself cops to spending a lot of the time shooting and reshooting his scenes more than ten times, or “As many as they’ll give me before we absolutely have to move on.”
Elsewhere in the profile, Stiller and Erickson expand on some of the previously reported delays. “I don’t think Ben would mind me saying that a part of the reason that it took so long is Ben is a perfectionist,” Erickson said, and that “There are times where we’ll have written seven episodes, and we’ll have a conversation, and Ben or somebody else will say, ‘Well, I think this detail could be better,’ and I’d sort of say, ‘Wait a second, we’d have to go back and rewrite every other episode’—and often we did. As months are ticking by, that was a scary process to have to go through.” Writer Rachel Syme reveals that Erickson emailed her after to clarify some of his comments and that “It would be inaccurate to say that production delays had to do with Ben Stiller’s super power of being a perfectionist,” which makes it seem, to an outsider, that he minded at least a little bit. You can check out the whole article here.
