After a long wait, severance pay Back. Season 2 premieres on Apple TV Plus on January 17, more than two years after the end of Season 1. The wait is especially hard because of how the Season 1 finale ended - a huge cliffhanger that will turn nearly everyone's lives upside down in this sci-fi thriller. Cliffhangers are a tricky thing. They can help keep viewers interested in what happens next, but they can also be frustrating, seeming to withhold information purely to keep people hooked.

severance pay I've struck that balance well so far, having had the opportunity to work with some of the creative team behind the show - creator Dan Erickson, director Ben Stiller, and star Adam Scott — talk about how they achieved this. "Honestly, it's just speculation in your mind," Stiller told edge. "You try to think about what the stakes are that we're setting and hopefully you end up winning it."

one of the trickiest parts severance payAt least early on, the team wasn't sure how audiences would react. It's a strange show about a group of office workers whose brains are surgically altered to separate work and home life. This essentially creates two selves: those who live in the outside world (the outies); and those who are confined to the basement offices of Lumon Industries (the innies). From there, things get weirder and weirder, involving everything from an office goat pen to a terrifyingly ominous dance party. While the show eventually found an audience, it wasn't destined during production.

"We produced the entire season in a bubble, and no one saw anything until it was all done, and we didn't know if anyone would respond to the show," Stiller said. "I remember the cliffhanger ending to episode eight of season one. I remember thinking, 'This is a really good cliffhanger, and I wonder if people will find the ending of episode nine to be a good cliffhanger as well.' "Did this all work out for people? Fortunately, it did."

Scott, who plays Mark on the show and also serves as a producer, agrees, saying, "Whether things work or not depends on the roll of the dice. The idea is to design the show so that it does what it does for those big moments." Be prepared and then hope it connects the way you planned. "All of this architecture was built in Episode 9," Scott explains. "I remember when we were shooting the finale, shooting the scene where Mark walks by[Harmony Cobell, played by Patricia Arquette]and calls her by the wrong name, and then talking to Ben and Patricia , just saying 'if they were still here with us at this moment, it would be great.'"

Erickson said the Season 1 finale worked in part because it both answered questions and introduced new ones. It gives viewers an interesting combination of satisfaction and mystery. For those who haven’t seen it yet – Spoilers ahead! —The ninth and final episode of Season 1 finds Mark and his colleagues doing something forbidden: using their inner selves to enter the outside world. There, they learn all kinds of important information about their true identities. In particular, Mark discovered that his wife, whom he thought had died in the outside world, was actually living an isolated life in Lumeng under the new name Ms. Casey. The episode ends with that shocking reveal.

“For Mark, that final moment of ‘she’s alive’, in a way, answered the question; “The question was always whether he could find Ms. Casey and whether he could get the message out to the outside world that she was there. ," Erickson explained. "We got the answers to these questions. But then it raises a whole new question: What now? How will this change the status quo internally and externally? "

It’s been a long wait, but Season 2 severance pay After that moment, you finally get some answers—and more, of course.