Fidelio (with Mike Schur and Sandra Bernhard)
The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller & Adam Scott
Audacy, Red Hour, Great Scott
4.9 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2025
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben and Adam are joined today by Mike Schur, who has created or produced many of the best TV shows of the last 20 years, including Parks & Recreation, The Office, The Good Place, and, most recently, the Netflix series A Man on the Inside. They talk about the sticky philosophical questions that influence both Severance and Mike’s work, and the challenges of creating and defining a distinct tone for a show. Plus, Mike reveals the super secret password to enter this podcast (hint: it’s also the password in Eyes Wide Shut). Then, Ben and Adam talk to the great Sandra Bernhard, who plays Nurse Cecily in Severance, to talk about her work in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and Cecily’s most iconic moments on the show.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott is presented by The Farmer's Dog. |
| 0:05.3 | Try fresh, healthy food at the farmersdog.com slash severance. |
| 0:10.7 | Hey, I'm Ben Stiller. |
| 0:12.6 | I'm Adam Scott. |
| 0:13.7 | And this is the Severance podcast with Ben and Adam, where we are talking all about |
| 0:18.0 | severance and the movies and TV shows and influences and people that have been a part of making the show. |
| 0:24.4 | And I'm excited for this week. |
| 0:26.0 | Yeah, Mike sure is going to be on the show. |
| 0:28.1 | Mike is a friend of mine. |
| 0:30.0 | He's a brilliant writer. |
| 0:31.3 | He's created, co-created, written or produced. |
| 0:34.5 | Chances are all your favorite shows, Parks and Rec, The Office, the Good Place, Brooklyn Nine Nine, Hacks, Master of None, and most recently a man on the inside, which is just excellent, starring Ted Danson on Netflix. |
| 0:47.5 | Yeah, and he's basically one of the people, I think, that's created this genre of the author's workplace comedy, the modern version of that. |
| 0:56.0 | And he's just so smart. |
| 0:57.6 | And also he's very interested in moral and philosophical questions. |
| 1:01.6 | He's written about them. |
| 1:02.6 | And I think it's a real theme in his work. |
| 1:04.6 | And I think we're going to get into a little bit of that with him also. |
| 1:07.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:07.3 | Mike even wrote a book about it called How to Be Perfect, the Correct Answer to |
| 1:11.3 | Every Moral Question. And then we're going to have Sandra Bernhardt, plays Cecilie on the show, |
| 1:18.0 | the amazing, unique, fearless performer that, for me, I've known for a very long time, |
... |
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