Your Numbers Are Bad (with Damon Lindelof and Dan Erickson)

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Speaker 1 The Severance podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott is presented by The Farmer's Dog. Try fresh, healthy food at thefarmersdog.com/slash severance.

Speaker 3 You know that thing where people say we're going to edit it out, but then they leave it in? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 But this one will be a little bit more. That's a big podcast movie.
It is, by the way.

Speaker 1 Particularly before a question. Like, you know, you don't have to answer this.
We can edit it out. But,

Speaker 1 you know.

Speaker 3 Right. Or we'll edit out this whole thing and then you feel like you're let in on something that they didn't.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So this will actually be edited out.

Speaker 1 This 100% will not be in the podcast. Right.

Speaker 3 So there's no way anybody will hear this.

Speaker 1 Zero chance. Okay, cool.

Speaker 3 Hey, I'm Ben Stiller.

Speaker 1 I'm Adam Scott.

Speaker 3 And this is the Severance podcast with Ben and Adam, where we're talking about severance and influences to severance and things that relate to severance and just severance itself.

Speaker 3 We're just going to keep talking about it.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk about severance. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 It doesn't matter. There are no new episodes right now.

Speaker 1 No. I'm just going to keep talking about, you guessed it, severance.
And then what are we going to do after that?

Speaker 3 Then we're going to talk about severance some more.

Speaker 1 Yep. And then after that, we're going to talk about severance, but this time through the prism of answering your hotline questions.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Do you know why I like this podcast? Why is that? Because I have an excuse to talk to somebody about severance.
Yeah. Like you, because

Speaker 3 you understand that it's like...

Speaker 1 I'm not going to get sick of you talking about severance.

Speaker 1 Sick or bored or just, you're not going to say to me, why do you keep talking about severance all the time yeah but before we get to the hotline you are going to speak to a very special guest yeah this is actually a really fun week for me because dan erickson is back on the show severance creator of course the big brain that we keep in a jar and so we're taking that jar off the shelf so he and i can talk to one of our very favorite television writers we're going to be joined by emmy winning peabody award-winning writer damon lendeloff he co-created a show that you know it's been mentioned on

Speaker 1 every episode of this podcast.

Speaker 3 A little show called Lost. Yeah.
You might have heard of.

Speaker 1 That's right. And he also created Watchmen, co-created The Leftovers, Mrs.
Davis. I mean, that's like a powerhouse list of shows.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm just excited to have Dan back on the podcast, and we're going to get to talk to Damon about world building, how Lost influenced Dan as a writer. It's going to be super fun.

Speaker 3 I'm excited for you to talk to him about Severance. He's so smart.
I met him a few times, really through you. I was able to get a bite with him once.

Speaker 3 And he's, you know, the guy has done it all in terms of television, in terms of creating a show for a streamer, creating a show for a network, creating a show for a cable channel, and understanding that process because each one of those is a totally different process.

Speaker 3 And when people talk about lost and how culturally affecting that show was, and they talk about the story and the debates about the story and the endings and all that stuff, right?

Speaker 3 What people always seem to leave out is like, oh, by the way, he also was doing that for a network, 22 shows a season for how many seasons? Five, six seasons? Six. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So like to have to do that on a schedule where every September you're on the air. And so he's done it all different ways.
He's just really, really smart and nice.

Speaker 1 Can you imagine looking down the barrel of making 22 to 24 episodes of Severance and knowing that you get like a six-week break and then you have to make another 22 right after.

Speaker 1 Like, that's what they were doing for six seasons.

Speaker 3 If you're lucky, right? If the ratings are good and you're top show on TV, which they were, then your reward is keep doing it. Keep going.

Speaker 4 Which is hard.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's crazy.
Is there anything that you want me to ask him for you?

Speaker 3 Ask him if he knows what the ending to severance is.

Speaker 1 Okay. I'm writing that.
Curious.

Speaker 3 He has great you could just let us know ending to severance okay great he's a huge severance fan so i'm sure he'll answer that uh swiftly i'm also curious like what you guys you guys like it's interesting because you're like hey he's damon lindelof you're adam scott now you're like these two sort of very important figures in science fiction uh drama what do you guys talk about when you're just hanging out that's a good question yeah we usually talk about movies or tv shows i had an idea though maybe what's that power washing Oh, shit.

Speaker 3 Does he have a power washer?

Speaker 1 That down. If he doesn't, I'm going to get him one.
I'm going to get you one, too.

Speaker 3 I feel like you two guys, I could picture you two guys power washing and just like kind of like brainstorming, spitballing ideas for shows.

Speaker 1 I would love to power wash something with Damon. It'd be so fun.
I'd watch that. If you power wash something with Damon, though, there's a huge cliffhanger at the end of it.
Right.

Speaker 1 Okay, enough about power washing, if that's even possible. Let's go listen to my conversation with Dan Erickson and Damon Lindelof.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'm just thrilled to be here with two guys that I'm lucky enough to call friends, Damon Lindelof and Dan Erickson.

Speaker 1 Damon Lindelof, of course, the co-creator of Lost, the creator of Watchmen, many other incredible shows. Dan Erickson, our big brain.
I can't believe I'm here sitting between these two guys.

Speaker 1 The clash of the Titans, except they're not going to clash because they're also friends. Dan and Damon, welcome to the show.

Speaker 4 Lovely to be here.

Speaker 5 I want to be the Kraken, and you can be Perseus.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 5 It's a momentous week, isn't it? Isn't it, gentlemen? It certainly is.

Speaker 5 Since you're not going to toot your own horns, I do feel like this is probably the first time that you've gathered for podcasting since the record-breaking Emmy nominations.

Speaker 1 I mean, record-breaking for us, incredible.

Speaker 5 No, no, but it was a very high number.

Speaker 4 We joined the 27 club. Right.

Speaker 1 Somebody told me, Dan, that you started getting 27 dresses memes.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I actually, I had like three different friends who sent me some variation of a joke like, hey, you're now the Catherine Heigl of the, of the Emmys.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 4 One actually photoshopped my face onto the poster, onto her on the poster.

Speaker 1 Oh, I want a copy of that.

Speaker 5 Do you think you could bring Catherine Heigl to the Emmys? Just platonically.

Speaker 4 If she's listening,

Speaker 4 she should know that she's invited.

Speaker 1 Guys, this is crazy. I wasn't planning on it happening this early in the show.
Oh, my God. But ladies and gentlemen, Catherine and I.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Catherine, come on in. Wow.
And she has her 27 dresses with her.

Speaker 5 She brought them all in on a rack.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 5 You have laryngitis?

Speaker 1 Yeah, she can't talk. She can't talk, but her problem works.
That is really exceptional. She'll be sitting here for the entire

Speaker 1 episode.

Speaker 5 Congratulations, though.

Speaker 1 Guys, thank you. Look,

Speaker 5 awards are so stupid. They really are.

Speaker 1 But they're also the most important thing that ever happened in our business.

Speaker 5 And I'm rooting for you, Emmy Knight. And I'm so glad that you're in the drama category because I'll be honest with you, there's a lot of comedic talk on this podcast when Ben is around.

Speaker 5 Is this by the way, is this the first time he hasn't been here? Yeah, should I feel special?

Speaker 1 And you know what?

Speaker 5 It's because I'm here.

Speaker 1 Because Ben isn't here, we can do whatever we want.

Speaker 1 We can get super serious. Yeah.
So I just want to start by saying, Damon, you know, we've been friends for a long time, but even before we became good friends, we had worked together.

Speaker 1 Do you want to talk about what we worked together on?

Speaker 5 I would love to. Great.
I'm so glad you brought this up. Great.
So, you know, I'm sure people ask you this all the time, Dan. How did you break through? Like, how did you get your foot in the door?

Speaker 5 What was your first day?

Speaker 5 So, to make a very, very long story short and get to the atom of it all, which is, you know, what he's, that's why he's making that gesture.

Speaker 5 He's pointing at himself and making that keep it rolling gesture is I graduated from NYU Film School and my attitude was that I would give myself five years to be paid to write something.

Speaker 5 That was my goal. So I looked at LA as kind of like a grad school.

Speaker 5 So I sent an email to all of my friends and said, I know there are these entry-level positions, perhaps a writer's PA or a writer's assistant. If you know of any of these jobs, please let me know.

Speaker 5 And my friend Julie Pleck, Julie's terrific. Amazing.
And a showrunner unto herself, Vampire Diaries, amongst many others.

Speaker 5 And she was kind of running Kevin Williamson's production company at the time. He had had a phenomenal success with Dawson's Creek.

Speaker 5 He was directing and had created this other show for ABC called Wasteland. And the idea was, what if we did friends, but it wasn't funny?

Speaker 5 That was literally, that was the elevator pitch.

Speaker 5 Yeah. It was a one-hour drama about very attractive 20-somethings.
The idea being that post-college, you're in a wasteland as you're trying to figure out what life is.

Speaker 5 And I was a writer's assistant on that show. And it was just, as all first seasons go, even the successful, the massively successful shows, it's just chaos.

Speaker 5 And writers were leaving and new showrunners were coming in. And somehow I wrote on spec an episode of the show as sort of a sample.
And I handed it to the youngest, the baby writers on the show.

Speaker 5 And they called Kevin and they were like, I think our writer's assistant can write. And then Kevin came over to my desk and he said, do you have an agent? And I I said, I do not.

Speaker 5 And he said, you need to get one. And then I was a writer and I was in the Writers Guild and everything else.
And the very first episode of Wasteland that I wrote, I think was the ninth episode.

Speaker 5 I co-wrote it with a woman named Pam Parker and a young Adam Scott. was the love interest.
His character's name was Coffee Boy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Philip the Coffee Boy.

Speaker 5 I don't even think you were Philip yet. You were just, you were just Sasha's love interest.
That's right. Sasha Alexander.
Sasha Alexander. And she called you Coffee Boy.

Speaker 5 And so, yeah, you were in my first produced writing credit.

Speaker 5 You were in.

Speaker 1 I don't think I were the stand-up guest star. I don't remember that part of it.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 We didn't meet, I don't think. I mean, I was very.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, maybe you were on set or something. I don't remember either.
This was 1999. Correct.
Yeah. I'm no mathematician, but I think that's at least.
20 years ago or so. Okay, over 20.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 It's one less than the number of Emmy nominations that Severance

Speaker 5 just got, is what I know. I've been told to work that in as many times as possible.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 I want to keep talking about Wasteland. It's okay if we fill the hour with Wasteland, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it should be all coffee boy talk.

Speaker 1 I did a bunch of episodes of that.

Speaker 5 You were so good that you recurred. And here's what's hilarious.
I don't think any of them aired because

Speaker 1 the show aired.

Speaker 5 two episodes and was canceled

Speaker 1 yeah but then we kept making episodes

Speaker 5 right yeah oh my god and then they all aired and i'm told it was very successful in brazil right I'm not making that up.

Speaker 1 Which is what we were aiming for.

Speaker 5 Have you been to Brazil?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I'm huge down there

Speaker 1 because of Philip the Coffee Boy. Yeah.
Correct.

Speaker 4 We went to Brazil together, and you were mobbed at the airport several times.

Speaker 1 Coffee boy. Coffee boy.

Speaker 5 They were speaking saying it in English.

Speaker 1 Yeah, in English with an American accent.

Speaker 5 Amazing.

Speaker 4 I think that for a show that is about sort of the emptiness, the wasteland of post-college life, to not air it is actually a great creative choice. That's right.

Speaker 4 That's really avant-garde and beautiful.

Speaker 1 And very meta, which is what Kevin Williamson was going for. Sure.
So knowing you guys as well as I do, we all work in TV, obviously, but we're all fans of TV kind of first and foremost.

Speaker 1 As far as being a fan goes, what does that mean to you? And what kind of fan would you say you are?

Speaker 4 Well, it's going to sound sad and or facetious, but to me.

Speaker 4 I'm somebody for whom like fandom can often sort of take the place of friendship at times in my life where I'm like, maybe I'm not living in my normal place or maybe I am, but for whatever reason, I'm just sort of in a lonely patch.

Speaker 4 For me, the shows that I've really loved, like there is absolutely a sense of like returning to your friends, returning home.

Speaker 4 You put it on and your body kind of relaxes a little bit in the way that it does when you're spending time with family or people that you care about.

Speaker 4 So, you know, I think that that for me, as I got into creating stuff, it was so important to me. I think some people find it cheesy to say, oh, you you have to love the characters.

Speaker 4 You know, you have to care about them. But I'm like, that's the point.

Speaker 4 Like, that's why I got into this is because like on certain nights when I'm feeling like it's just me in this big old lonely universe, you know, I'm sitting down and I'm watching The Office or I'm watching Lost or I'm watching something with people that I have built a relationship with it, you know, albeit one-sided and parasocial.

Speaker 4 And yeah, I don't know that that's the most healthy thing, but for me, that's a lot of the pleasure and the joy of being a fan of film and TV.

Speaker 1 I feel exactly the same way.

Speaker 1 And I do get that same kind of serotonin rush if I put on The West Wing or Lost or Sex in the City or one of these shows where I just love the characters so much that I feel like I know them like they're friends of mine.

Speaker 1 How about you, Damon?

Speaker 5 Well, Adam, I'm just a fan of cinema.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. Here we go.

Speaker 1 Settle in.

Speaker 5 Here's what I'll say is I think that Dan's probably a little bit younger than I. You are a contemporary of mine, although you look considerably younger than I am.
Thank you.

Speaker 5 But there's like a whole generation of storytellers that self-identify as Gen X.

Speaker 5 And we essentially were not raised by parents. We were raised by movies and television shows.

Speaker 5 That isn't to say that we were like neglected, but I think that the idea of parenting as kind of like a gerund or a verb, like didn't really conventionally exist.

Speaker 5 They were just kind of coming around on like Dr.

Speaker 5 Spock saying like, maybe we shouldn't beat these things, but like we should probably provide food for them and occasionally like attend a back to the school night.

Speaker 5 But it's like we were kind of on our own. And so, and particularly in this age where the VCR was just invented.

Speaker 5 And then also, I think most of us, as a result of the lack of parenting, our parents then got divorced.

Speaker 5 And so all of these movies like E.T. and, you know, Back to the Future is kind of like an outlier where it's like, oh, they're together.
They're on the verge of divorce, by the way.

Speaker 5 And she obviously wants to have sex with her son, which is just not, it doesn't bode well, you know, but it felt like all those movies that we were watching, you know, when I saw Stranger Things, for example, I was like, this is what it was.

Speaker 5 And so my affection, as Dan was talking about the characters, is it was one way, right? But I did have that like. unhealthy feeling of like, I know these people.

Speaker 5 And the thing about this medium that is, that people watch on devices, some of which may be called televisions, there's an intimacy to it because of the scale.

Speaker 5 It's in your living room, it's in your house, and the people's heads are the size of your heads. It's different than movies where you're sitting with a bunch of other people.

Speaker 5 It's like church or temple. There's a reverence to it, and they're projected at the scale of God.
And so I did feel this intimate connection to that stuff.

Speaker 5 And then my dad was a huge comic book sci-fi guy and dragged me to actual comic book conventions that were about standing on a long line and getting something signed by a comic book writer or a comic book artist or Ursula Le Guin, you know, like I grew up inside that culture.

Speaker 5 And now, like, I was really touched listening to this podcast.

Speaker 5 I think it was Conan who was talking about the blender and this, the whole idea of like, you're throwing all these things in your blenders. And his is like Warner Brothers

Speaker 5 Tex Avery cartoons and like Johnny Carson and Dave, but Johnny was inspired by Jack Benny. So Jack Benny is in Conan's blender too.

Speaker 5 And the metaphor that I've always used, which I'm now going to ditch, is like, we're more DJs than musicians in terms of we're remixing.

Speaker 5 We've got all these amazing albums that we love, but we're kind of like finding different ways in and out of them and maybe creating something that feels original, but we're openly acknowledging that this is kind of a bit beyond homage, you know, where I'm just like, I can just say if Twin Peaks didn't air, I'm not sitting here talking to you guys right now.

Speaker 1 It's just like the ingredients wouldn't be.

Speaker 5 Because it's not even like, it not only informed my own art, but it so inspired me.

Speaker 5 It so made me want to do this, you know, and you have to say like, these are the things that made me want to do this. And that's what true fandom is.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's interesting because speaking of things that you're a fan of that goes into the blender, I know during season one, Dan, you and I would talk about lost and talk about how much we love lost.

Speaker 1 And I remember I was doing a rewatch of it while we were shooting season one.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I remember you telling me.

Speaker 1 I just wanted to ask you, Dan, you know, you're a bit younger than Damon and I. And so when

Speaker 1 Lost was on TV, you must have been, I don't know, in high school or I was just out of college, actually.

Speaker 4 Oh, you were just when I first, yeah, I look a lot younger and handsomer than I am.

Speaker 5 But he did graduate college at 12, like a kid out like that kid in Revenge of the Nerds.

Speaker 1 That's the thing. This whole time, I thought you were 15 years old.
I thought I was 15.

Speaker 4 15. No.
Yeah, I saw it. Actually, it's funny.

Speaker 4 I had graduated college and me and three other guys were driving down to LA

Speaker 4 to find a place. We ended up finding a two-bedroom apartment in Studio City where the four of us lived, two guys to a room.

Speaker 4 And my friend Nathan had his laptop and had a bunch of like DVDs, which was an early form of you could show media on like a little disc.

Speaker 1 And a silver disc?

Speaker 4 A silver disc on one side. The other side said lost.

Speaker 4 But that, that, it was like we were driving down in this big van from Bellingham, Washington to L.A., and he showed me like the first 10 episodes in the car.

Speaker 4 And then, you know, we immediately just, I was hooked. And the whole time that we lived together, we would go to the Blockbuster, which was there in Studio City, and we would rent one.

Speaker 4 And then we would finish that one, and we would go back. And so it was, you know, what the kids now call binging, but, you know, we had to, we had to go and walk across the street to do it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you had to get some exercise in in between DVDs. So So, what was it about the show that hooked you in? How did it kind of spark your imagination?

Speaker 4 I mean, there just really hadn't, I think it's fair to say there had not been anything quite like that in terms of how propulsive it was and how just every episode you felt like you were getting more and more addicted and you were digging further down and finding new treasures.

Speaker 4 But it really was at the end of the day, you know, it was that I loved the characters.

Speaker 4 I loved Hurley and I loved Charlie and I wanted them to be okay and I wanted to see that they were going to be okay. You know, I wanted Claire to have her baby and be healthy and everything.

Speaker 4 And I think to this day, like my favorite moment from Lost is just that very simple moment, or one of my favorites, I'll have to say, is that moment where Hurley gives Ben Linus the, I think it's the candy bar.

Speaker 4 And it's just, there's no dialogue. He just hands him the candy bar and Ben sort of stares at him and then takes it.

Speaker 4 And it's just this sweet little kind gesture where you wouldn't have expected to find one. And those were the moments that I think even more than the mystery kept me coming back.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know what I keep going back to when I think about Lost is, I believe it's in the first episode when Locke looks at Walt with the

Speaker 1 orange peel in his mouth.

Speaker 4 And he smiles.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's in the pilot.

Speaker 1 That is just a wild moment.

Speaker 5 That was a JJ idea.

Speaker 4 I would have followed Locke anywhere after that moment, honestly.

Speaker 5 It was amazing, Terry O'Quinn.

Speaker 1 Damon, we've been getting a lot of hotline questions coming in.

Speaker 1 A lot of people people kind of really talking about severance and lost and the similarities between them and a lot about how the fans like to come up with theories to these mysteries. So

Speaker 1 you guys want to hear one of these questions that concerns both the shows?

Speaker 5 Oh, boy. Is it a crossover pitch? Are they happening?

Speaker 5 Because I know that there was some grumpiness, I think, on Mike Scher's part about crossover episodes, and then you and Ben somehow converted him.

Speaker 1 And now he's

Speaker 5 then he was talking about the on the Love Boat or something. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Wait on me. Let's find out.
Catherine, would you like to hear the haunt line? Oh, yep. She would love to.

Speaker 4 That's a big nod.

Speaker 5 Wow. Cool.

Speaker 1 I didn't know she. Are you a fan of both the shows, Lost and

Speaker 1 this bit is

Speaker 4 never going to stop because it's invisible Catherine Heigl is my favorite bit.

Speaker 6 Hey, Ben. Hey, Adam.
My name's Johnny. I'm from Ohio and a huge fan of the show.

Speaker 7 As I've been watching, I've been really just enjoying some of the similarities and possibly even inspiration between Severance and Lost.

Speaker 7 And one of the things that I noticed while watching Lost is just managing all of the questions and mysteries that would come up in the show.

Speaker 7 So could you guys speak to you a little bit about how you're managing the balance of creating the mystery of the show and what's going on without overloading us with questions without answers?

Speaker 7 Thanks so much, guys.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Ohio. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, yeah, I'm curious to hear how Severance inspired Lost. Yes.

Speaker 4 But before we get into that, I mean, I do think that there was something on Lost where it's like

Speaker 4 you could solve a sort of a smaller mystery and get that hit of dopamine, but find that it was part of a greater tapestry. And I think, you know, one thing that

Speaker 4 I said going into season two was I would like to get Gemma out, or at least out of where she is right now. And I would like to know what the numbers are because those were both these big questions.

Speaker 4 And I want those answers to lead to bigger, equally or even more interesting questions. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I do think that if we still had truly no idea what the numbers are right now, we would maybe be starting to lose people a little bit more than we have.

Speaker 4 It's that nesting doll thing of trying to sort of start on the inside and

Speaker 1 make your way out. Yeah, I remember that being a thing that you and Ben both felt we really needed to address in the season was answer what the numbers are.

Speaker 5 We had some experience with numbers on lost as well.

Speaker 4 But your numbers are bad. Oh, yeah.
Our numbers are good.

Speaker 5 Your numbers are good. But I do think like the overlap in the Venn diagram, and I think I'm going to attribute this to something that I think Quaron said when he was talking about children of men.

Speaker 5 Again, I don't know if I mentioned earlier, but I'm kind of into cinema.

Speaker 5 But it was sort of like the idea of a MacGuffin being a what is never going to be as emotionally uplifting as the MacGuffin being a who.

Speaker 5 And so the idea of like the numbers in Lost started out as something that Hurley played in the lottery and then it and created horrific luck, but it was also something that Rousseau was repeating in a message and then they were written on the hatch and they just kind of kept cropping up there.

Speaker 5 And it was like, the answer always had to be like, but what do the numbers mean? is like Dreyfus asking, what does this mean?

Speaker 5 And it means that aliens are coming and they're going to be returning some pilots that they stole or borrowed. And then they're going to to take some more people.

Speaker 5 But that's not what he means by what does it mean? And I think that the beauty, what we were trying to achieve on Lost, and it's something that I certainly chased in.

Speaker 5 my subsequent shows, but I feel like Severance has in its first line of dialogue in the pilot is some deeper sense of meaning.

Speaker 5 I think that this kind of idea of identity and what its relationship is to memory, and it's those kind of like deeper philosophical questions that if Cold Harbor is related to that central idea of who am I?

Speaker 5 You know, like, am I the sum total of the experiences that I had?

Speaker 5 This kind of total recall construct of like, wow, I've been rooting for Arnold for this entire movie, but now here's this videotape of him talking to himself.

Speaker 5 That's what I really thought of when I saw Helena for the first time was like, wow, like, am I still rooting for her? Right. And the whole indie-outy concept, you've gotten me to treat.

Speaker 5 Mark as two different people when he's one person. That's what the show is about.

Speaker 5 And so as long as the mysteries are centering around that fundamental idea, you're much more playing with what does it mean on an existential level?

Speaker 5 What does it mean to be alive versus I'm opening up the mystery box and a dove flies out? It's just like those things, it's not to say they don't matter. The mythology does matter.

Speaker 5 And when Carlton and I were messaging around Lost and we'd be like, people are all wrapped up in the mythology. All that matters to us is the characters.

Speaker 5 What we should have said and what I I reflect upon is it's the marriage between the characters and the mystery that makes the show work.

Speaker 5 Like, if I don't feel something when you you tell me what Cold Harbor is, you know,

Speaker 5 it can't just be revelation. It just can't be like a whodunit.

Speaker 5 It really has to

Speaker 5 connect back to the central idea of the show.

Speaker 1 Okay, it's time for a quick break. We've got more from my conversation with Damon Lindelof and Dan Erickson right after this.

Speaker 1 You know, I've been on a bit of a self-improvement kick lately, and one of my very favorite ways to unwind and actually learn something has been through Masterclass.

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Masterclass.com/slash severance.

Speaker 9 Hey everyone, I'm Josh Radner, and I am so excited to tell you about how we made your mother, a rewatch podcast looking back at how I met your mother.

Speaker 9 And I'm here with Craig Thomas, who co-created the show along with Carter Bays.

Speaker 10 Hi, Craig. Hey, Josh.
Somehow, it has been 20 years since the show premiered. I'm going to check the math on that.
10 years since it went off the air.

Speaker 10 And we thought that made this a perfect time to look back, see what the hell we did, and why the show still seems to resonate with fans around the world today.

Speaker 9 Follow and listen to How We Made Your Mother, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 Adam. Yeah.

Speaker 11 I want you to close your eyes and imagine you're working in Lumen's HR department.

Speaker 1 Okay, give me a second. It takes me 10 minutes to close my eyes.
Oh, wait. I did it right away.

Speaker 11 Okay, keep them close. If our partner, ZipRecruiter, was helping Lumen hire for various roles, how do you think HR would feel about ZipRecruiter's ability to search resumes quickly via keywords?

Speaker 1 Let me get into character here.

Speaker 1 I think they'd love it. It's efficient.
It's targeted. We can search words like cure lover and affinity for long hallways.

Speaker 11 Okay, you can open your eyes now. Oh, thank you.
So if you were actually a business owner and not an actor who plays a guy who works at a weird company, like you do in the show,

Speaker 11 ZipRecruiter has all these tools and features and more. And they're designed to make hiring faster and easier.

Speaker 11 So see for yourself when you try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com slash severance.

Speaker 1 ZipRecruiter excels at speed. It's smart technology.
Starts showing your job to qualified candidates immediately.

Speaker 1 And if you've got your eye on an exceptional candidate, you can use ZipRecruiter's invite to apply message to personally reach out to them.

Speaker 11 Yeah, see how much faster and easier hiring can be with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

Speaker 1 You know what? Lumen should make ZipRecruiter a perk. It's way more fun than a finger trap.

Speaker 11 Finger traps are not even fun.

Speaker 1 No, I actually get legitimately claustrophobic when I use a finger trap. Yes.

Speaker 11 I know. Even the prop ones.

Speaker 1 Totally.

Speaker 11 Because the finger traps are real.

Speaker 1 It freaks me out when I use it.

Speaker 3 You know what else is real?

Speaker 11 What? ZipRecruiter.com is real. So go to it, ziprecuiter.com slash severance right now to try it for free.
That's right.

Speaker 1 Ziprecruiter.com slash S-E-V-E-R-A-N-C-E.

Speaker 1 Damon, for whatever reason, you know, Lost and Severance are both shows that people refer to as mystery box shows. And I just have a general question.

Speaker 1 Does that phrase mystery box show, does that come from JJ's reference? He had a story about a box that he grew up with and never opened?

Speaker 5 Yeah, he gave a TED Talk and it's like, it's a box with literally a question mark on it. And it's a great TED Talk.

Speaker 5 And I think like, you know, it's one of those things that seemed like wonderful at the time. And then it became like a very harsh criticism.

Speaker 5 And I was curious about whether or not you guys are experiencing this because like as soon as the pilot aired, you know, people were like, What's the noise in the woods?

Speaker 5 And it was like, Oh, God, if you're interested in that, wait till you meet Rousseau, you know, like, and there it was just mystery upon mystery upon mystery until we basically got to the season one finale.

Speaker 5 They find the hatch, which JJ had pitched in the very first meeting that we ever had. They should find this thing in the ground and they should spend the entire season trying to get it open.

Speaker 5 And I was like, They're not finding it until we know what's in there. And so, the writers immediately started, we understood that that was catnip, but that is a literal mystery box.

Speaker 5 And so there was a whole summer between the finale, which aired in the middle of May and the premiere, which aired in early September, where like the culture and anyone that knew that I had any affiliation with the show was just like, just tell me, just tell me what's in that fucking hatch.

Speaker 5 But on the heels of that, they'd go, don't tell me, but I need to know. that you know everything.

Speaker 5 I need to know that there's like a detailed plan and you're not pulling this out of your ass. And the punchline of JJ's mystery box, TED Talk, is the power of ambiguity.

Speaker 5 Right. You're like, he's going to open it up here at the end of the TED Talk.

Speaker 5 Spoiler alert, he doesn't because the whole idea is like your imagination or at least the anticipation of what's inside the box is so much greater.

Speaker 5 And it's like, I will say that there's a part of me that loves, you know, ambiguity and also gets infuriated by not knowing the answer like having to argue it out.

Speaker 5 And, but I like Michael Hanukkah movies, and it's sort of like, you know, he made cachet in a certain way.

Speaker 5 And you can debate whether or not you get the answer in the end credits or not, but it's just not, it's not in black and white. And that's like, that's so cool to me.

Speaker 5 But, but I do think that this sort of idea of are you stringing us along? When are we going to get the answers that are satisfying to us?

Speaker 5 I feel like on the periphery of Severance fandom, and I try not to abuse my friendship with you, Adam. And I, I had dinner with Ben and kind of like met him for the first time before,

Speaker 5 maybe the week before the finale air. I think he was like coming out just for that, but I hadn't seen Cold Harbor yet.

Speaker 5 And he was just in the space of like, I think it's great, but like, how's it going to play? Yeah. Are they going to feel fed? Yeah.
You know, and the insatiability of it all.

Speaker 5 And again, you guys are, you've made 20 episodes as of right now. So we made 25 the first season of Lost.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 5 we did that between, I met JJ the last week of January and the finale aired of season one, episode 25, hour 25 aired the following May. So 15 months, 25 episodes

Speaker 5 from. Hey, how are you? And that was the, that was the speed.
And so when people would say to me, have you got it all worked out? Right.

Speaker 5 I was was like, you know, every Monday we come in, there's a blank board. And then, and then the following Tuesday, it's completely filled while we're editing.

Speaker 5 You know, it was like, there was no time. The first time that we got to work on our mythology was between seasons one and seasons two.
We had, I got married.

Speaker 5 So we had nine days off before we went back to work on season two.

Speaker 1 Good lord.

Speaker 5 So how's it going for you guys?

Speaker 1 Well, that's the thing is the definition of a mystery box show, if we're going to take it from JJ Abrams' TED Talk, is that the box never opens.

Speaker 1 And that's why it's special is because of that ambiguity.

Speaker 1 But inherent in a mystery box show and the audience's enjoyment of it, according to the audience and according to people who like to write about television, is that not only do you know what's in the box, but at some point we get to find out what is in the box.

Speaker 1 That's, at least from what I've gathered, that seems to be the overriding concern of a lot of viewers of the show. So is that how you take it as well?

Speaker 1 Is that how you define what a quote-unquote mystery box show, Dan?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think so. I mean, and of course, it's never with a character, there's always what they want and there's what they need.

Speaker 4 For me as a fan, I feel the same for myself, where I'm like, there's the thing that I want that is going to keep me watching this show.

Speaker 4 But at the end of the day, by the time I'm done watching the show, the question is, did I get what I need? Which is often not the same thing as what I thought I wanted.

Speaker 4 And that's not to dismiss people's very justifiable desire to get these answers or their, their faith in us that we have thought it through enough, that they're in a world that makes sense and has an internal logic.

Speaker 4 But I think there's, there's so much power in just having that central question. For me, it's, you know, watching Lost, it was that moment where, where Charlie goes, you know, guys, where are we?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And he's, he's, he's better at doing his voice than I am. But

Speaker 1 no, I think you gave him a run for his money.

Speaker 4 I think his impression of himself is spot on

Speaker 4 personally.

Speaker 4 But, you know, for us, there's guys, what is it we actually do here? Right. Which is your line.
And you need something like that to sustain that, to keep you clawing your way out.

Speaker 4 You know, to me, it's... I think of severance like we're starting in this small box in the center and we're going to claw our way out and there's a slightly bigger box outside.
Right.

Speaker 4 You know, it's a Russian nesting box

Speaker 4 situation. And the question is, what's going to keep you, what's going to keep you clawing your way out?

Speaker 4 And once you get out and you look back and you see what you were inside of this whole time, is it going to be satisfying? Or are you going to look at it and go, oh, that was it? Right.

Speaker 4 You know, and it's hard. And I don't know yet if I am good at that,

Speaker 4 at successfully landing that plane, but I guess we'll find out.

Speaker 1 I think you are. I mean, the thing that I often find is when people come up, particularly between seasons or after a finale, saying, just tell me what this is or tell me what that is.

Speaker 1 They don't actually want to know any of it. What they want is to have that feeling of wanting to know.
That's the key to the whole thing. It's not, they don't actually want me to answer that question.

Speaker 1 If I did, it would be a huge bummer. So it's that middle ground.
That's where the fun is.

Speaker 5 I do want to just say.

Speaker 5 circling back to something that Dan said earlier when he was talking about fandom, like the most valuable lesson that I think that I've learned over the years, at least in terms of my own storytelling, is something that you've already kind of seized on, or at the very least, it appears that Severance has figured out, which is that if the characters don't care about that mystery, solving that mystery, then it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 5 Like, that is to say, it may matter to a certain subset of the audience.

Speaker 5 And I was listening to the pod a couple of weeks ago, and you and Ben were talking to one of those incredible podcasters who just goes like really deep.

Speaker 1 Oh, man.

Speaker 5 And he was, he was the Alan Stare. I got to listen to his pod.
but he was talking about how the chips work. And I was like, holy shit, I've never even thought about this.
I've never even thought.

Speaker 5 Yes, as he was going down, like, well, Miss Casey, she could have multiple hard drives and blah, you know, and I was just like, okay, that now he's really interested in that.

Speaker 5 But unless there's a character on the show who needs to know how the chips work, because most of the characters on the show, they're interested in, you know, affairs of the heart, or they've all voluntarily severed.

Speaker 5 So the last thing they want to know is the answers to these mysteries.

Speaker 5 The inherent mystery of the show is kind of like built into it.

Speaker 5 And one of the biggest and most deserved criticisms that we got on Lost is, why aren't the characters trying to solve the same mysteries we, the audience, are, you know, and was like, well, Locke was really fixated on opening up the hatch, but he felt like the island was communicating to him in some way because it had healed him.

Speaker 5 But everybody else was kind of like pretty nonchalant about opening up the hatch.

Speaker 5 And so there was almost like a level of amnesia that had to like float in over the characters, what we called the Tom and Jerry effect, which is like Tom would literally get the shit kicked out of him violently by trying to kill Jerry.

Speaker 5 And then it just dissolves. And then it's the next morning and they're both back to normal.
And you think that at least Tom would say, I have a sense memory that this is going to

Speaker 1 be a wily coyote thing.

Speaker 5 But he's going to just keep doing what he's doing. And I think that that is actually built into the premise of self-inflicted amnesia.

Speaker 5 That is to say, like, if they wanted to solve these mysteries, they wouldn't be severed.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Going off what you're saying, I think that's something that I've really loved about Dan's writing from day one, which was, you know, there's this rule that I've mentioned on the show many times, which is Mike Schur's rule for television, which is you should be able to take the character names off of the page of any page of a good TV show and know exactly whose line

Speaker 1 applies to which character, right?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I've never heard that.

Speaker 1 And I feel like from day one, not just that, but just looking at a photo of the MDR workers of Britt, me, Zach, and John, it's like, oh, I know who these people are.

Speaker 1 So the characters from day one have been integral to the mystery and integral to the audience's interest in the mystery.

Speaker 1 And lost also, you just love these people and you don't want a hair on their head to be harmed. Right.

Speaker 5 You know, there is no more compelling mystery on the show than why did these people choose to do this to themselves.

Speaker 5 And we get that for Mark from the jump. Right.
You know, like, and then of course it gets undone to some degree when we, when we learn that Gemma is still alive.

Speaker 5 But like the exhilaration of that little child running into the closet and throwing his arms around Zach's neck. And he's just like, what the, and you just are like, this guy's a dad? Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know, and like that to me, and this is not to take anything away from whatever the cures have been up to for centuries, but like that was more satisfying than any kind of mythology answer, which, you know, I mean, you're going to have to give, but the mythology has to be in service of the character's journeys.

Speaker 5 And so the idea of like, you know, now that Irving is out, the idea that he was compiling. lists and information about Lumen, that's all really interesting to me.

Speaker 5 But I was much more interested in, is he going to find Bert? You know, what, what's going to happen there? And so that idea, again, sort of of like, who are these people?

Speaker 5 Why did they do this to themselves? What are they trying to heal? What are they trying to forget? Because this is, it's quite a radical procedure.

Speaker 5 And I think that the show is basically saying it's a bad idea. You know, like all great sci-fi is like, hey, there's world hunger.
We should make giant tomatoes. And then you get fucking giant ants.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it's like, there's great intention, you know, it's a temporary salve.

Speaker 5 But I would be very surprised if we get to the end of the journey and the show is saying like everybody on the planet should get severed. I mean, look how well these people are doing.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know, I don't think anyone's doing particularly well. Right.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
We're not going to, we're not going to be releasing the actual chip in tandem with the series finale. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Like this whole thing was an ad because we've been holding it in our hands and looking at it the entire time.

Speaker 1 Here you go, everyone. Yeah.

Speaker 4 But Damon, I think you made a really fantastic point where, where you know the mystery heigle is nodding as well yeah she agrees she is in full agreement but like where the mystery is only interesting in so much as it's important to the characters and and to me that was why it was so important or or i think that that's why the reveal that miss casey is gemma landed the way that it did not just because it was surprising and shocking but all of a sudden it was because suddenly this question of what do we do here is tied you know inextricably to the loss and and the marriage, because whatever it is that we're doing here, that is what caused your happy domestic life to be ripped away from you and the love of your life to be ripped away from you.

Speaker 4 And especially, I think, in season two, when

Speaker 4 we had the flashbacks and actually got to see in episode seven, that life that you had had, to me, even just watching that episode for the first time, I suddenly was more invested in the mystery than I had been, which speaks to the work you guys did and the work Jess did on that episode.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 yeah, I think for every character, there is this question of what is it that we do here? But the bigger question is, why does that matter to me?

Speaker 4 How does that affect who I am on the inside and the outside? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Damon, do you have any questions for Mr. Erickson?

Speaker 5 I do, of course. I'm not going to ask any mystery questions because I don't want you to answer them and we both know that you won't.
I guess I have two questions.

Speaker 5 The first is, in all honesty, do you think Ben is listening to this?

Speaker 1 Why would he?

Speaker 5 And why haven't we taken greater advantage of that? Like, I do feel like we should embed some kind of secret passcode that

Speaker 5 we would only be without explicitly saying, did you listen to that one? Like,

Speaker 5 I'll give $1,000 to the charity of your choice if Ben listens to this, but how could we prove it? Because there's no way he will.

Speaker 1 How about this? Yeah. How about if if Ben listens to this, he would have to make it this far into the interview.
Yeah. And we will know he listened to it.

Speaker 1 If the next time he sees any of the three of us, it has to be in person.

Speaker 1 He has to go to shake our hand and then say, do you have the recipe for bananas foster? Perfect. Perfect.
Yep. Perfect.
And I do.

Speaker 4 Although, should we pick something that isn't his catchphrase already?

Speaker 1 Because he says that's a good idea. That's a good idea.

Speaker 5 Right, exactly.

Speaker 5 And my, I know that like the goats are, are an example of this, right? Cause I've heard you guys talk about it.

Speaker 5 But one of the things that happened on Lost was that there was something that we were kind of like, oh, this is interesting to us and exciting. And we're talking about it, and it's in an episode.

Speaker 5 But we just had no idea that the audience was going to lock in on it in the way that they did. And there are a number of instances and this happened on the leftovers as well.

Speaker 5 But other than the goats, now that

Speaker 5 the message in the bottle that is

Speaker 5 the creative process, where you're just making this and there's like 500 people who are making it. And then suddenly there's millions upon millions upon millions of people who watch it.

Speaker 5 Is there anything about season two? Because the goats were introduced to us in season one.

Speaker 5 We got a meal.

Speaker 5 Again, I will pitch you, Dan. I will write the Gwendolyn Christie a meal spin-off where they just wander from town to town and solve people's problems.

Speaker 4 Solving mysteries.

Speaker 5 No mysteries, just problems.

Speaker 4 Yeah, personal.

Speaker 5 Just everyday problems.

Speaker 5 Always with the mysteries, this fucking guy.

Speaker 1 You're right. You're right.

Speaker 1 My question.

Speaker 4 Thank you for pulling me back from that.

Speaker 5 My question is, in season two,

Speaker 5 was there anything that kind of like the audience locked in on that you were like, oh, huh? Okay. Like, what didn't see that coming?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think that, well, it's not that I didn't see it coming, but I think Dr. Maurer in the fertility clinic.
Ah,

Speaker 4 you just see him like walk by in the background.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 But for a lot of people, that's become the thing.

Speaker 1 Huge moment. Yeah.
Wow. Yeah.
Robbie's. Robbie is so huge.
He's amazing.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Yeah.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 5 The singing voice of the beast.

Speaker 1 Well, and the speaking voice, isn't he? Oh, yeah. Of course.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Is he really? Yeah.
For Beauty and the Beast.

Speaker 1 I thought he was only the singing.

Speaker 5 Sometimes they break it up. Like my buddy Brad is the singing voice of Aladdin.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 5 But they have someone else voicing Aladdin.

Speaker 1 But wait, wasn't Peebo Bryson singing some of the Beast songs?

Speaker 4 Maybe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know where I've had that one out. Guys,

Speaker 5 let's answer this on our Beauty and the Beast pod.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're recording. We're recording right after.

Speaker 5 And Catherine, you can, she wants to stick around. She knows.

Speaker 4 Would you like to know, but she can't tell us.

Speaker 1 Oh, she just wrote something down, guys.

Speaker 1 I'm a Beauty and the Beast trivia specialist. Yeah.
I couldn't come up with anything.

Speaker 5 And by the way, it's called Be Our Guest. That's right.

Speaker 1 That's it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Beast Our Guest.

Speaker 5 Even better.

Speaker 1 You guys, thank you for being here. I love both of you.
I love hanging out with you. I love talking about TV and movies and stuff, but I'm mostly just happy that you're my friend.

Speaker 1 Both of you guys are incredible artists, and we're just so, so thrilled to have you on the show. Or at least I am.
We'll find out if Ben is.

Speaker 4 We're going to find out. Yeah, Ben.

Speaker 5 And by the way, guys, gentlemen and ladies and everyone listening, don't you dare say to Ben, hey, just the next time you see those guys, he's got to listen.

Speaker 1 Tone of silence.

Speaker 5 You are now complicit in the greatest podcast surprise party that is deeply unmeaningful in most ways.

Speaker 1 And no one can send it to him on social media.

Speaker 1 Hey, this is what's going on. This is a thing.
No.

Speaker 5 He has to organically decide to listen to a podcast on which he does not appear.

Speaker 1 All right. It was great having you guys on.
Thank you.

Speaker 5 Pleasure.

Speaker 4 Thanks, Adam.

Speaker 1 That was my conversation with Damon Lundeloff and Dan Erickson. We're going to take a quick break and then I'll be right back with Ben to answer some of your hotline questions.

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Speaker 1 Rules and restrictions apply.

Speaker 1 All right, shall we get into some hotline questions?

Speaker 5 Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it.

Speaker 15 Hi, guys. My name is Amanda.

Speaker 8 Huge fan of this show and this podcast. So my question is about Mark's Fish.

Speaker 8 Who is taking care of these fish as he's going on his little reintegration missions at the end of the season? And also, what are their names? I love Mark's Fish. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1 Thanks, Amanda. They do have names, don't they?

Speaker 3 Do they? Did we give them names?

Speaker 1 I thought someone named them.

Speaker 3 Really? Maybe somebody on set named them. I think.
Yeah. I didn't, I never, I mean, I don't know if it's the same fish actors that we've had in every episode, though.
One's blue and one's red.

Speaker 1 Fish actors.

Speaker 3 But they're, I remember when we were making the choice to put the fish tank there as we were setting it, I remember thinking to myself, this is a big decision because this fish tank and these fish are going to be here for like if the show goes a number of seasons.

Speaker 3 Yeah. You know, and the fish have, I think we've gotten a lot of mileage out of the fish in terms of what we're paying them because they're really cheap.

Speaker 1 They're cheap, but whenever we use them, there is a person on set who's looking out for the fish. Right.

Speaker 1 I remember we had to get some close-ups of the fish, or you had to get some close-ups of the fish. So the camera was right up there against the fish tank.

Speaker 1 And, you know, you needed the fish to swim into frame now and then. And it was getting tough to coax them, but we couldn't tap on the glass.
No, no.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you can't tap on the glass.

Speaker 1 No. You couldn't put like anything in the water to try and get them to swim in a direct, we just had to wait there.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you have to respect the fish's, you know. I mean, the great thing about fish is you can negotiate a deal with them and tell them, oh, you know what? You want like a bump?

Speaker 3 You want like a, you know, like 50% pay bump. And you agree to it.
And then 30 seconds later, they forgot.

Speaker 1 That's right. They forgot they even asked.
You don't have to pay them anything. Exactly.
We did pay them because we're not assholes.

Speaker 1 We paid them.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And by the way, at one point, there was a move to turn them into cg fish and i was like no we're saving those fish actors are gonna get the work you know save their jobs was there really a discussion about cg fish yes there have been discussion look we don't use cg animals or a lot of cg on the show unless it's like kind of like hopefully something you're not noticing and i feel like animals have not been perfected yet and so those are real fish and then the reality is somebody from the society for prevention of cruelty to animals has to come and be on the set and you have to have the fish wrangler.

Speaker 3 And so it's like, you know, there's like a whole entourage. But I love the fish.
And I love kind of what everything that they represent and visually how they feel in the apartment.

Speaker 3 And I'm glad we made the choice to go with the fish.

Speaker 1 Me too. It is weird now that in movies, even if there's a dog or a cat, oftentimes it's completely CG'd.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I still feel like I can tell every time.

Speaker 1 Me too.

Speaker 3 Me too. Has there ever been a CG animal that you haven't been able to tell it's not a CG animal?

Speaker 1 Well, I wouldn't know, would I? Because it would convince me so much. So hard.
No, I feel like it's always quite noticeable.

Speaker 3 Like, this makes me think of the dead seal.

Speaker 1 Seal. Yeah.
Yeah, me too. I just thought of that.

Speaker 3 Do you know a weird thing was when the dead seal in episode 204 was also, I think, was sculpted by Pankow, who does all of our...

Speaker 3 He did an amazing job with that.

Speaker 3 To get that decaying seal. And then when we got to Newfoundland to shoot episode 208, there was a real dead seal on on the beach when we got there.

Speaker 1 Whoa. Yeah.
That's it.

Speaker 3 That's everything else.

Speaker 1 Did you take pictures? I did. Did you get a selfie with it?

Speaker 3 No, I'm not. That would have been, that wouldn't have been good to do.
Not respectful.

Speaker 1 It's a seal. The one that Pankow created was

Speaker 1 really disturbing because it was in the midst of decomposition. It was disgusting.
It looked like it smelled horrible.

Speaker 3 It looked like that and didn't smell at all because it was like it was.

Speaker 1 No, it smelled actually delicious.

Speaker 3 Okay, next one. Next question.

Speaker 15 Hey, Ben. Hi, Adam.
My name is Saab, calling from France.

Speaker 15 I've been a huge fan of the show since the beginning and would like to thank all of the team for the amazing show.

Speaker 15 I'm also a photographer and love all the behind-the-scenes you share, Ben, on Twitter. Is there any chance for you to release a photo book someday?

Speaker 15 Can't wait for the next season. Greetings from France.
Bye.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Bendo book. I think that's a good thing.
Bendo book.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'd like to do that. I'm glad we have all those pictures, and it's really fun now to interact with people online who are, you know, fans of the show, who really appreciate those.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I love

Speaker 3 behind-the-scenes photos. I was just watching some thing about Jaws' 50th anniversary, watching some behind-the-scenes footage I'd never seen.
It just like it's the best, right?

Speaker 3 When there's something that's so imprinted in your mind, and then you get to see a little bit of like what the, you know, or anything like from the shining when you see the scenes footage from that totally it's fascinating i still it still blows my mind when i see a behind the scenes photo like you said like i've never seen from back to the future right star wars or something it's still just crazy i do i love it so much and i love seeing the ones that you put out on instagram and stuff they're yeah it's but it's really it was fun to start like taking them and then have you guys like make fun of it and be like make jokes about it in a fun way because then it felt like okay it's okay to do this because i do feel like the best behind-the-scenes photos are when it's you know somebody who it can get in there and not sort of disrupt what's going on yeah and been fun so yeah I think it'd be great yeah

Speaker 1 should we do one more yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 3 hey there Adam and Ben my name is Alistair I thought I would ask what inspired the finale freeze frame shot I loved that scene I thought it was a great way to close off the season thank you yeah so good I mean honestly, when Dan wrote out the draft of the script and he had that, that final, like them riding through the hallways, it just, for some reason, it was just like a thought that just like jumped into my head.

Speaker 3 I knew what we could do with the hallway lighting, and I thought it could be really romantic and also really disturbing.

Speaker 3 And the idea of a freeze frame, you know, of where they're going to go, what's the future, that just seemed like, you know, the way to go.

Speaker 3 And for me, there's definitely like, I guess, just like subconscious images in my head of freeze frames from movies from when I was a kid and movies that ended on freeze frames and zoom-ins to freeze frames.

Speaker 3 I have like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I think ends on a freeze frame on Donald Sutherland, like going

Speaker 3 right pointing. And those images are sort of like in your head subconscious.

Speaker 1 I love the zoom-ins so much.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and then

Speaker 3 we wanted to make sure it had that grainy feel of a 70s zoom in. And since we don't shoot the show on film, we actually had that shot, that scene filmed out onto 35 millimeter film.

Speaker 3 And then we re-transferred it and zoomed in on the freeze frame of the film. Yeah, so that you get sort of the film grain feel as you go in on it.
And then the song was part of it.

Speaker 3 The thing about the song at the end, I always thought we cut it together the first cut of it, and it went on for a long time, which I really was into because I thought, okay, this is the end of the season.

Speaker 3 And for me, it was always like, this is just sort of like, we're kind of going back to the first scene and, you know, the first episode.

Speaker 1 I remember loving it and feeling like I needed that space to like absorb what just happened. Right.
Right.

Speaker 1 And, you know, knowing, because I think you know, this is it. This is the end of the season.
And just kind of hanging on and seeing where the fuck are they going?

Speaker 1 And then to just have that final shot where you really get to take in where we kind of are starting to think a little bit and looking at each other. I love all the space in that.

Speaker 3 And you guys, you guys really hit that too.

Speaker 3 Because in the script, you know, it was like important to really get that idea that at first you're sort of elated elated and then it kind of slowly turns into like, oh, what the fuck, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And we did that. I think we did that like 10 or 11 times.
We did that run down the hallway and we were shooting it at like 100 frames a second. So it was super slow motion.
But you guys were doing

Speaker 1 full speed.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And I knew that we would just then go back and find the right freeze frame.
And then the red coming in, I think, also for the show kind of signified just a change of some type.

Speaker 1 And that's it for the episode. You know what? I can't believe it's already been five weeks.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What do you think? Should I tell listeners the good news? Yeah, go for it. Okay, we are coming back with more episodes of this podcast.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 We've really loved talking with people who have impacted us while making Severance. And there are so many more who we want to bring on the show.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and there are more people who help make Severance who we want you all to hear from.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so we're going to take a few weeks off, but then we will be back.

Speaker 1 And in the meantime, keep calling the hotline and keep looking into what the heat index really is you know what it is it's humidity times temperature maybe i don't actually know i'm already confused okay

Speaker 1 the severance podcast with ben stiller and adam scott is a presentation of odyssey red hour productions and great scott if you like the show be sure to rate and review this podcast on apple podcasts spotify or your other podcast platform of choice it really makes a difference if you've got a question about severance call our hotline 212-830-3816.

Speaker 1 We just might play your voicemail and answer your question on the podcast.

Speaker 3 Our executive producers are Barry Finkel, Gabrielle Lewis, Naomi Scott, and Leah Rhys-Dennis. This show is produced by Ben Goldberg.
It's mixed and mastered by Chris Basil.

Speaker 3 We have additional engineering from Hobby Cruises.

Speaker 1 Show clips are courtesy of fifth season. Music by Theodore Shapiro.

Speaker 1 Special thanks to the team at Odyssey, Maura Curran, Eric Donnelly, Michael LeVay, Melissa Wester, Kate Rose, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.

Speaker 3 And the team at Red Hour: John Lescher, Carolina Pesakov, Jean-Pablo Antonetti, Martin Balderutin, Ashwin Ramesh, Maria Noto, John Baker, and Sam Lyon.

Speaker 1 And at Great Scott, Kevin Cotter, Josh Martin, and Christy Smith at Rise Management. I'm Ben Stiller.
And I'm Adam Scott.

Speaker 3 Thank you for listening.