IN AND OUT AND BACK AGAIN

The hit mystery series Severance ups the stakes of its workplace thriller in a new season following a long hiatus

- ELIANA DOCKTERMAN

BEN STILLER ISN'T A FAN OF PUZZLE-BOX SHOWS. “I never watched all of Lost, I'm sorry to say,” he admits. “I sometimes get frustrated because I'm not really good at figuring stuff out.” So he's an odd fit for director, executive producer, and creative force behind the buzziest show of that genre to emerge in recent years, Severance, the second season of which premieres Jan. 17 on Apple TV + after a nearly three-year hiatus.

But Stiller and producer and star Adam Scott recognized the potential in newcomer Dan Erickson's surreal script: Employees volunteer to undergo an operation, called severance, that bifurcates the consciousness into work life and personal life. Each morning, the severed person enters an elevator at Lumon Industries, a mysterious biotech company, and their work self or “innie” becomes conscious. At 5 p.m., the “innie” clocks out and the “outie” re-emerges with no memory of the job. Erickson came up with the concept while working a mind-numbing gig at a door factory. “It's one of those ideas where you can't believe this hasn't been done,” says Scott. “It's an immediate hook.”

And it was Stiller's idea to end Season 1 with one of the most memorable cliff-hangers in modern TV history. The innie characters stage a jailbreak, during which Scott's protagonist, Mark, discovers that the wife his outie believed to be dead is alive and trapped inside Lumon. Simultaneously, innie Mark's love interest Helly (Britt Lower) learns that her outie, Helena, is the daughter of Lumon's cultish CEO; she underwent severance to build support for the controversial procedure.