Best Television Series – Drama – Nominee
Severance is a science fiction psychological thriller television series. It follows Mark (Adam Scott), an employee of Lumon Industries who agrees to a severance program in which his non-work memories are separated from his work memories.
Created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, the show is nominated for a Golden Globe in the Best Television Series – Drama category.
Interviewed by the daily newspaper New York Post, Ben Stiller said this: “The show jumped off the page and reminded me of great office-based comedies – but in a surreal world. They’ve become a genre in American comedy over the last 20 years.”
For Stiller, this new work is a dream come true: “I’ve wanted to be a director since age 10. It’s what I love doing. It’s not having the pressure to be on camera. I’ve always loved Japanese food and the Severance sushi connection is just there naturally. Maybe in Season 2 we’ll have some kind of sushi experience.”
The series also stars John Turturro, Christopher Walken, Patricia Arquette, Zach Cherry, Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, Jen Tullock, Dichen Lachman, and Michael Chernus.
Severance, which bowed on Apple TV+ on February 18, 2022, garnered 14 nominations at the 74^th Primetime Emmy Awards, including acting citations for Scott, Turturro, Arquette, and Walken. The drama has been renewed for a second season.
On portraying his scenes in Severance, leading actor Adam Scott said that switching between personas felt like a “math problem” to him. “We ended up doing [those transitions] a lot, and I really liked doing them. I could do them all day. I’m one of those [actors] that wants 100 takes, if possible… For me, it was often just a matter of addition and subtraction. It also depended on where ‘outie’ Mark was in the story and where ‘innie’ Mark was in the story; we had to go from one to the other. But as for the specific contents of the person, it was trying to do an internal math problem and just sort of let some stuff go or let some stuff in, depending on which direction we were going.”
Then, he added: “As we got further and further down the road, the elevator transitions got easier and easier once going back and forth became more habitual. As I got to know each of them better and better, I was able to know exactly what those contents were that I was either getting rid of or putting back in to have that internal shift that would need to happen.”