Ben Stiller Has The Perfect Response To Reports About Severance's Troubled Production

Although "Severance" fans have plenty of praise about the show, they'll also be happy to admit it could test their patience. Not only did season 2 totally tease us with the reintegration storyline, but the wait between seasons 1 and 2 was absurdly long. On April 18th, 2022, the season 1 finale left fans on a massive cliffhanger, one they had to wait until January 17, 2025 to see resolved. 

This wait time between seasons is only beaten out by "Stranger Things," which can blame its visual effects-heavy premise for the delays, and "Euphoria," where everything that could go wrong has gone wrong with the season 3 production. So, what's the "Severance" producers' excuse? Some fans have speculated that there's been behind-the-scenes drama. The rumors have been fueled by reports of fighting between showrunners Ben Stiller and Dan Erickson, and a "toxic environment" overall. In a recent interview with Variety, however, Ben Stiller shut those rumors down: 

"Everybody on the show gets along. There's never been any weirdness on our show between anybody. [...] I don't think there's ever been any creative process that doesn't have some conflict, and that's actually really important, because you're questioning and constantly trying to make sure that the choices you're making are the ones that are going to hold up in two years."

Stiller also said that he didn't believe that many behind-the-scenes conversations should necessarily be made public: "I don't want to tell people the inner workings of what goes on because, frankly, it's private."

To be fair to the show, the "Severance" season 2 production suffered a lot from the 2023 writers' strike, which put the industry on hold for 148 days. The writers' strike is a culprit behind most of the delays for TV shows that returned in 2024, and it was particularly devastating given that Hollywood had only recently recovered from the massive industry disruption that was the COVID pandemic.

"It took a while to write season 2," Stiller said in a 2024 interview. "Then we started to shoot in October of 2022, and we got shut down by the strike in May [2023]. At that point, we had completed about 7 of our 10 episodes, and then we had to regroup after the strike. It takes us a while to prep the show. And so, we didn't start shooting until January [2024]. Then we shot from January to May to finish the last three episodes."

Dan Erickson explained that, in addition to the strike, "Severance" is a complicated show to write for. The nuanced characters and riveting tension that fans love is not something that can be pulled off quickly. As Erickson put it:

"Each character has two lives — essentially, two personalities — and we are expanding. For me, the writing was the most painstaking part of the process because there were so many ways we could go. And sometimes we would come up with something that worked perfectly well on paper, and then it wouldn't be until we got there and we're shooting it that we realize: This isn't quite it. We were never willing to let that turn it into something that wasn't perfect."

You can listen to our own interview with Erickson on this episode of the /Film podcast: