WORKING MAN

The Hollywood slog that led Adam Scott to “Severance.”

- RACHEL SYME

Before Scott was TV's preeminent office guy, he spent years as a struggling actor.

In late 2012, Dan Erickson was a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring screenwriter in L.A., working a dull job in office management at a door-parts company. Day after day, he sat at a computer monitor cataloguing hinges and cabinet pulls. He longed to escape the drudgery, but he needed the money; he was saddled with debt, and drove a dinky scooter to save on gas. One morning, while walking into work, Erickson had a thought: What if I could skip ahead to the end of the day, and my work would magically be done? During his lunch breaks, he began turning this idea into a pilot for a high-concept workplace thriller called “Severance.”The result was part “The Office,” part “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” A sinister corporation called Lumon Industries has invented a microchip brain implant that can bisect a person’s consciousness into an “innie” and an “outie”—an office self and a home self. Lumon employees who choose to have the implant installed work on a subterranean “severed floor” of Lumon’s headquarters. The chip is activated as they ride an elevator down, erasing their knowledge of their outside lives. Their home selves, in turn, know nothing of what happens within the office’s walls. The show’s protagonist, Mark Scout, is a severed man toiling in Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement Department, sorting numbers into arbitrary groupings. Outside the office, his outie is a bereft widower who chose to sever his mind just to get some emotional relief. At work, his innie is upbeat, affable, on task—and, like his severed co-workers, effectively trapped forever at the office, by design.