This story contains major spoilers for the Severance season two finale, “Cold Harbor.”
The sets on Severance are characters within themselves. Viewers scour for clues and pick apart every possible prop, color scheme, and shadow. One fan even prepared for the highly anticipated season two finale by crafting an “emotional support” foldable replica of its iconic interconnected four-desk office. After all, the Apple TV+ dramedy almost entirely takes place within the walls of a megacorporation, Lumon, which severs its employees’ consciousness into an “innie” and an “outie.” The former does all the work in that office and the latter goes home never knowing what they even worked on.
Jeremy Hindle, the production designer for Severance, gave his team a very specific objective to achieve that feeling: “Design a place that if anyone ever got out of, they couldn’t explain what it was.”
Hindle could’ve never anticipated the amount people would be reading into his designs: he almost passed on the show five years ago because the set as described in the script reminded him too much of any office. He still crafted a lookbook with designs inspired by industrial designers Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche, the films Fargo and Jacques Tati’s Playtime, and actual offices from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Executive producer Ben Stiller was captivated by those images and he and the rest of the team joined forces to forge the visual narrative.
Ahead of the highly anticipated Severance season 2 finale season 2 finale, Hindle walked GQ through Severance’s epic sets, those creepy wax figures, and how Twin Peaks continues to inspire him.
GQ: Season two begins with Mr. Milchick taking over as the manager of the severed floor. What was the difference in approach to the set design for Harmony Cobel’s reign versus Milchick’s reign?
Hindel: I mean, Milchick is just very anal. He’s particular and precious, and he had the back room, which we knew [Harmony] had, but we never saw it, so we got to play with that.
Strangely, he’s much more anal and particular than Cobel in a weird way. Like an iceberg, there’s so much we don’t know about them.
Jon Pack
Do you ever play around with the audience and throw in details to make them think the show is going in a direction it isn’t?
I wouldn’t say that. Even we don’t particularly know where Heven Haile Dan [Erickson’s] going to go with it sometimes.
Are there any particular Easter eggs that you hope people have caught on to?
It’s funny, I’m not on Reddit because I’m too old for that. But my daughter’s into it. She and my son send me stuff. The Reddit people have found everything, and I think they’ve invented a million more.
You’ve talked before about the way the offices used to be designed in the ’60s and ’70s, and how there was a clear separation between work and home. You would come to work, there’d be three things on your desk and you would dress really nice, and then you would leave. What do you think is the optimal workspace design—Lumon, or something else?
I don’t know. The work-life balance right now is really hard. People want to talk to you seven days a week. Really how I see it is the companies now want you to work 12 to 14 hours a day. So they’ll let you bring your family to work, basically. Bring your photos, put them on the wall, and decorate your space because that’s where you’re going to live. I don’t know if you’ve seen Google saying the optimal workday is a 12-hour day or something.