Ben Stiller: Apple was patient in allowing Severance creator Dan Erickson the freedom to learn on the job

Defector

Severance famously came from a writing sample that Erickson sent around that he wrote while working at a boring desk job. "I mean, basically this is the first thing Dan Erickson’s had produced," says Stiller, who acquired the script for his Red Hour production company. "So, he was thrown into a traditional situation of running a writers’ room. For me, I don’t come out of that world, believe it or not. Like the writers’ room thing for me has never been something I’ve had a lot of experience with. I haven’t particularly ever really loved that process. I get what it is and it’s necessary when you have to create a lot of scripts. But Dan hadn’t run a writer’s room before. And so what Dan and I decided to do, after looking at a number of his scripts, was to go back to the drawing board. We had Dan basically rewrite almost all the scripts of the first season, and work with the writers, who are all really confident writers, but making sure that his voice was in them. That was something we all agreed on. All those writers contributed a lot and are actually coming back for a second season, but it was very important for Dan’s voice to be the main voice in there. I felt like the show needed to kind of go in its own direction, it wasn’t anything from Apple at all. And they have always had very smart notes, and they’re very sharp, but at the end of the day, this comes down to, basically, subjective choice in which way you want to go. And there was a freedom there. For whatever reason, there was the freedom that they gave us to explore that."

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• Severance proves Adam Scott is one of our great actors: Mark Scout "is unlike any of Scott’s previous characters," says Rachel Leishman. "I’ve always known he was a great actor; he’s one of my favorites, but watching him in Severance is like watching someone I always knew could do it finally find a place where others saw him in the same light. And I’m not alone. There are plenty of us out there who love Adam Scott, but we all do probably feel a little smug."
• Creator Dan Erickson says writing the show's fake books is his favorite part of making Severance: “If I could, I would write the in-universe books and materials all the time," he says. "I really like writing the show, too, but I think that’s my favorite thing to do. Ricken’s book is much more stream-of-consciousness than anything else, because I don’t see Ricken as a big rewriter or even a big checker of the things he does. With Ricken, it just sort of pours out. It’s me purging all the dumbness I have, but then it keeps coming back somehow. It’s so fun and so ridiculous.”
• How Severance parallels the short-lived 2008 Christian Slater NBC drama My Own Worst Enemy
• What to read while waiting for Severance Season 2