Severance Season 2 may be one of the most anticipated TV shows of 2025 – but when Dan Erickson first put pen to paper, its pilot had several major differences.
Severance revolves around Mark (Adam Scott), a ‘severed’ employee of Lumon Industries. As a result of a controversial procedure, his experience of life is split into two: his ‘innie’ goes to work, while his ‘outie’ has no memory of anything he does at his job.
In other words, he effectively gets to skip the most boring part of his day, while one part of his brain never gets to see the world beyond Lumon’s liminal offices.
As you probably expected, Erickson was inspired by his own boredom when he had an office job. However, through years of development with Ben Stiller, executive producer Jackie Cohn, and Apple TV, it underwent some big changes.
Severance creator reveals differences in original pilot
If you want to read Erickson’s first script for the Severance pilot, you can check it out here.
He spoke about it on the new Severance podcast with Stiller and Adam Scott, revealing “a number of differences.”
“The biggest difference is in that original version, it’s actually Mark waking up on the table [instead of Helly in the first episode], and I believe he is birthed out of a giant sphincter in the ceiling, and he’s sort of plopped down naked onto the table,” he explained.
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“He wakes up and we sort of go through his first day, and he’s being trained by this snarky young woman named Helly, and he comes in and meets Irving and Dylan. We go through the day and it’s a much more Terry Gilliam Brazil vibe and more overtly comedic at times.”
Also, Mark’s wife wasn’t dead in this version of Severance (it’s unclear if it included Ms. Casey or the Gemma reveal), and he meets Ms. Cobel after accidentally killing her cat with his car.
It gets weirder: she invites him in and he watches as she tortures her rat… but the rat is severed, so it snuggles into her when she switches its brain. This is the point he learns exactly what Severance is, and it convinces him to go through the procedure.
As Scott said on the podcast, “this sounds like a really fun but exhausting version” of the show. Cohn also described it as the “cartoon version” of Severance.
However, some elements were carried into the pilot, like Helly’s input survey. “It sounds like in order to find the tone we did land on, you had to reach that far and experiment on those outer edges to really zero in on what we found,” Scott said.
Before it premieres on January 17, 2025, check out our Severance Season 2 review, read more about O&D, and find out why Season 2 took so long.