If you didn’t The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott part of your weekday schedule that you miss Cutting off Easter eggs that may change your perception of some of the show’s most memorable moments. After revealing this Apple didn’t want Adam Scott in the series and that original pilot script if Helly R and Mark S’s stories were reversed, executive producer/director Stiller now explains how the eminent dance sequence from the first season surprised more than the audience.
In the seventh episode of the first season, titled “Defiant Jazz”, Helly (Britt Lower) and the Macrodata Refinment crew are treated to what supervisor Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) calls “The Music Dance Experience” as a reward for achieving the completion benchmark of which we still don’t know anything about. What followed was one of the most indelible sequences in the show’s tiny history: The usually stoic Milchick danced in Technicolor delicate as if he had been transported to the 1970s with quaaludes controlling his limbs. Uninhibited joy and unbridled dancing were irritating in a place where handshakes followed only formal requests. It also shocked the people who created the program.
“A choreographer came to us, but basically Tramell just walked away and said, ‘I have some ideas. I have some thoughts. Then they just showed me the dance he came up with,” Stiller jokes.
Lumon’s workspaces tend to be monotonous, mundane and devoid of anything beyond four interconnected cubicles. Disrupting this with this silliness throughout the season’s seven episodes added a bit of creepy levity that makes the bleakness of the characters’ everyday lives more apparent. This is because every detail of the show appears to have been carefully orchestrated, right down to the lights used in the scene, which Stiller revealed he hoped would “not violate the reality” of the show.
The look of surprise on the Innies’ faces as the lights began to change colors emphasized the strangeness of the scenario and was quite genuine. “We didn’t know the lights were going to change until we were shooting that scene,” Scott reveals.
There are only two episodes left until the podcast ends. They will also share compelling facts about the recent season Cutting off during the broadcast of each episode. Hopefully we’ll get some answers about these damn goats at some point.
