After what feels like months of radio silence, we’ve finally got an update on what exactly is going on with Severance season 2 from a very reliable source. However, if you’ve been holding your breath for an official release date for Severance season 2, it’s not good news.
It’s one of the best shows on Apple TV Plus, but fans of Severance have been left longing for new episodes of the comedy-thriller since the final episode of the first season aired on April 8, 2022.
Now almost two years after that cliffhanger ending, director Ben Stiller has shared an update on how production on the show is going — and in a surprising admission, revealed even he doesn’t know exactly when Severance season 2 will be released.
A long time innie production, a long way off until it comes outtie
The show “does not have an actual date,” the director and Zoolander star admitted while guesting on the RoomMates show on YouTube. You can watch the interview below — jump to the 1 hour, 16-minute mark for the Severance discussion (unless you’re an NBA fan, which the podcast is otherwise focussed on).
"So 'Severance,' we're shooting it now,” said Stiller.
“It’s coming soon and we don't have an actual date but I've been working on the second season of it for a long time, since we had a strike, an actor and writer strike, back last year — it went from like May to October. So that cut us off for a while. And we're going to be shooting until probably like the end of April and it will be coming out sometime after that soon."
While the interview doesn’t reveal answers to the key Severance questions we’re still racking our brains over, it’s a fun listen for fans of Stiller, who goes into the thought process not only about the jump from going in front of the camera to behind it, but also from a career primarily in comedies to making something actually quite tense and cerebral in Severance.
So with Severance season 2’s release date still up in the air, how can this new information inform a fresh estimation of when the show will land? If we look back at the shooting schedule for the first season against its actual release date, it finished shooting in June 2021 before debuting in February 2022 — a roughly eight-month gap. Using that as a marker, a November 2024 release date — nearly eight months on from a filming wrap of April 2024 — could make sense.
The complicating factor here is that it’s difficult to tell just how much filming had already taken place before the actors' and writers' strikes took place. If lots of footage was already in the can, some time-consuming post-production work that did not require actors and writers could have been completed, speeding up the process once the cameras stopped rolling, which could push that timeline forward. The flipside to that will be Apple’s own TV Plus programming schedule — that quiet post-Christmas February release for the first season helped make it a smash hit, and there’s nothing stopping Apple from pushing it further back still. However, if recent Apple TV Plus viewership figures are anything to go by, Apple may want to fast-track it!
At least then, for the time being, your guess is as good as the director’s at the heart of the production.
