Ben Stiller directs new show, "Severance"

One may see why interested viewers might have been a little taken aback by the director credit when they pressed play on the first Severance episode in 2022. Ben Stiller, the man from Tropic Thunder, Zoolander, and There's Something About Mary? Ben Stiller, that one? As it happens, one of the driving forces behind this far more somber sci-fi series was the same man who starred in some of the most famous and ridiculous comedies of the 1990s and 2000s.

For viewers who hadn't seen Stiller's prior directing endeavor, it could have appeared like an odd fit. That would be the 2018 Showtime limited series Escape at Dannemora, which depicted the actual events of two prisoners who broke out of the Clinton Correctional Center in Upstate New York in 2015. It was Stiller's most obviously emotional endeavor to date and his first time directing a limited series. Additionally, given the unexpected artistic and thematic connections between the two, it may have been a kind of unintended dry run for Severance.

From the beginning, Stiller actively participated in the creation of Severance. Stiller received Dan Erickson's script for the pilot episode as a submission to his production company Red Hour Productions in 2015. He served as executive producer and director of a few of the episodes, with Aoife McArdle directing the remaining ones, helping to see the project through to completion. His involvement in the show predated his work on Dannemora by a few years, but his work on the latter series would prove influential on Severance's final form, if not intentionally.

Check out severance on Apple TV.