Get the latest gossip

The man behind Severance: ‘I’m an accidental cult leader’

The smash hit drama has broken records for Apple TV, but what’s lurking behind the compellingly strange wintry dystopia? The show’s creator Dan Erickson explains

In 2012, when Dan Erickson was a budding TV writer in his late twenties, he found himself bored to a state of near catatonia while doing a factory job cataloguing door parts. A decade later that notion became a TV drama: Severance, on Apple TV+, set in a strange wintry dystopia where the employees of a cruelly cultish company called Lumon agree to a brain implant that means their work selves — or innies, as they are called — live entirely different lives to their “outie” selves in the wider world. The show, which Erickson created and writes, and which has Ben Stiller

Get the Android app