Movies - TV
The World Of Severance Was Inspired By A Very Relatable Real-Life Pain
By JOE ROBERTS
The eerily familiar tone of Lumon Industries in Dan Erickson's "Severance," as it turns out, appears to have been inspired by the creator’s experience working temp office jobs in LA. "I wasn't important in any way,” Erickson revealed. “Just working temporary office jobs ... In those hours on the job, I was resentful of not being in a grander place in life."
Beyond that experience of office life, Erickson was going through a "really hard breakup of a five year relationship," which seems to have manifested in the show as Mark S. grieving his wife, Gemma. As Erickson explained, the breakup forced him to confront the fact that his temp jobs were providing him with a way of completely zoning out.
While the events of "Severance" are, of course, an exaggerated version of this experience, what gives the show a truly unsettling undertone is that it doesn't seem all that exaggerated. The fact that the show built its whole look around a real-life place — the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex in New Jersey — is further testament to it being a little too close to the real world for comfort.