Dan Erickson was working in a tiny office cataloguing hinges and deadbolts for a door company when the show came to him. «I just…

Dan Erickson was working in a tiny office cataloguing hinges and deadbolts for a door company when the show came to him. «I just found myself walking in one day and thought, I don’t want to do this anymore. And if I have to go in today, I would prefer to just skip ahead to the eight hours and disassociate.» He immediately recognized how dark that thought was. «We should want more time, not less.» When Ben Stiller read the script, what he latched onto was not the sci-fi concept but what Stiller called «the initial sadness of the idea» — that «one man would willingly cut his life in half, » something he found «simultaneously really funny and deeply sad.» Erickson and Stiller then pushed the idea further. «We wanted to be sure that it was about more than just this kind of idea that we’re different people at work versus at home, » Erickson said. «The show is very much about identity and who we are at our core. Also just the way that in a corporate setting, we can have our humanity sort of diminished, and in some cases kind of willingly diminish our own humanity so that we can fit into that setting, and what the dangers are of that.» Adam Scott on playing Mark: «He’s stripped himself of an identity that most of us latch onto. He’s just moving along through life without feeling or doing much of anything. He can disappear for eight hours and not feel all of the pain in his everyday life.» Series: Severance (2022)