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The ‘Severance’ creator says none of the fan theories have gotten it ‘exactly right’

The show is returning for its second season after almost three years off the air.

By Joe Allen Jan 15, 2025 4:23 PM

Britt Lower in Severance Season 2 — Apple TV+

As fans prepare for the return of Severance, many are also revisiting the theories they first posited about the show back in 2022. While there’s been plenty of speculation about what might be going on in the series, creator Dan Erickson says no one has totally nailed it…yet.

“I love all of them and some of them are kooky, but the show is kooky, so it makes sense,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I would not say that I’ve seen anybody get it totally right. We are trying to lay down the seeds of where it’s ultimately going, and I do think that people notice that. ‘They said this in episode 2, and so I bet that’s going to pay off in this way,’ and sometimes that lines up a little bit with what we’re doing. But I don’t think that I’ve seen anything where I’m like, ‘Oh God, they got it. Time to leave the country and change my name.’”

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Erickson even admitted that he loves reading Reddit, but has to be careful or he’ll wind up spending too much time reading fan theories about his own show.

“I would just do that all the time and spend my whole life looking at people’s theories and seeing people’s fan art,” he explained. “And I do, up until the point that it starts to get me in my head. I’ll see a theory and I’ll be like, ‘That’s such a good idea, I wish that we were doing that,’ but at the end of the day, we know what we’re doing and the job is just to continue in that story.”

Severance returns for its second season on Jan. 17 after a three-year break and tells the story of the employees of a mysterious company known as Lumon. Maybe after season 2 someone will be able to totally nail it.

Joe Allen is a freelance writer at Digital Trends, where he covers Movies and TV. He frequently writes streaming… Read Full Bio

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