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In late June Patently Apple posted a report about Apple TV+ sending a contingent to Comic-Con in July promoting. Severance, For All Mankind, Mythic Quest, See, Invasion and Foundation. The convention that opened on Thursday led to the news that ‘For All Mankind’ was renewed for a four season and a little more information about the making of ‘Severance,’ a show that has received 14 Emmy nominations early this month.
According to Deadline, the team representing ‘Severance’ focused on discussing the challenges of bringing the breakout series to life. “The first challenge to grapple with — both on the page and on set — was one of tone. During the conversation moderated by Patton Oswalt, creator-writer Dan Erickson noted that as singularly strange as Severance wound up being, the original pilot script was even “more acid trip-y.” It featured, for example, a pair of disembodied legs running down one of the show’s long white hallways. And it was elements like this that would eventually need to be pared back.
One major challenge for Severance‘s actors was to carefully calibrate their performances with tone in mind—grappling correctly, to start, with the world-building show’s strange dialogue.” Director-EP Ben Stiller admitted that “Dan’s writing is so specific, that sometimes it was hard to get it just right.”
But of course, the principal performance challenge stemmed from the show’s premise, which called for most cast members to find a way to play two subtly distinct versions of the same character: one that worked at Lumon Industries and the other being when the character went home at night. A computer chip in their head would would know when to turn on when entering the workplace, leaving the character completely oblivious to the personal life while at work. The actors had some difficulty keeping the two personalities in check and consistent at first.
Another noteworthy challenge in creating Severance was the physical disorientation that came from shooting within the set for the “severed floor” where Mark and his colleagues work—a labyrinthine set of white hallways, with a visually peculiar office at its center.
The Severance creatives spoke later in the panel about their excitement to be at Comic-Con, and to see how much the show has resonated after making Season 1 in a Covid bubble. Creator-writer Dan Erickson Erickson noted at the same time that the show’s fandom, and the fan theories that have come with it, are both rewarding and part of the challenge as he’s begun writing Season 2.
Erickson added that “I was just on Reddit everyday for a while because it is kind of addicting. It’s really interesting to see what [fans’] theories are. But eventually I had to pull back a bit. It’s just that thing of infinite options, and at some point, you have to commit to what you’re doing. There’s an infinite amount of paths that we could take, so I really enjoyed it, but have had to back off in recent weeks.” For more, read the full report by Deadline.
You could read more about the series from SeveranceWiki.
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Archive: Apple TV News
