“Welcome back, Mark S!” says Milchick (Tramell Tillman) in the Severance season 2 trailer, sharply dressed in a blue blazer and turtleneck. “It’s been a minute.”
You can say that again!
It’s been two-and-a-half years since the shocking season 1 finale of Severance, one of Apple TV+’s most beloved genre shows, and the first trailer, crazy camera moves aside, is almost as head-spinning as the many twists viewers were left with back in 2022. Adam Scott’s Mark is almost a proxy for the show’s audience struggling to remember where things left off, particularly when he says to his strange new office mates, “Who are you people?”
The new crop of nameless Lumon drones features Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development, Search Party), Bob Balaban (Gosford Park, A Mighty Wind), and Stefano Carannante (Blue Bloods). Obviously there were far too many big character moments for the likes of Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irv (John Turturro) for those characters to be replaced altogether. Severance is a show that would be perfectly suited for a reset, but surely Lumon is up to its old tricks in this trailer, trying to fix the mess created by the reintegration experiment at the end of last season. Mark’s new co-workers, we’re guessing, are almost guaranteed to have full memories of Mark having been with them for weeks or more. That’s how these things work!