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Fresh Air

For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated

Fresh Air

NPR

Tv & Film, Arts, Society & Culture, Books

4.434.4K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Apple TV+ drama series Severance is back for its second season. It's a dystopian take on work-life balance — where characters have their personal and professional lives surgically separated. He spoke with Ann Marie Baldonado in 2022 about the making of the series.

Also, Justin Chang reviews one of this year's most talked-about Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature, No Other Land. It was directed by a collective of two Palestinian filmmakers and two Israeli filmmakers. Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Eric Glass.

0:01.0

On this American life, sometimes we just show up somewhere, turn on our tape recorders,

0:05.0

and see what happens.

0:06.0

If you can't get seven cars in 12 days, you gotta look yourself in the mirror and say,

0:12.0

holy, what are you kidding me?

0:13.0

Like this car dealership, trying to sell its monthly quota of cars, and it is not going well.

0:17.0

I just don't want one balloon to a car.

0:19.0

Balloon the whole freaking place, so it looks like a circus. Real life stories every week. This is Fresh Air. I'm David B.

0:25.9

In Cooley. The hit drama series Severance, a sci-fi take on work-life balance, is now into its

0:32.9

second season on Apple TV Plus after a long hiatus. Today, we feature our interview with Adam Scott,

0:39.6

who stars in it. You may know him previously from his role in Parks and Recreation, playing

0:45.1

Ben Wyatt, government worker and love interest for Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler.

0:50.8

He also was in the series Big Little Lies and in the cult favorite Party Down.

0:56.3

In Severance, as Mark S, he's a guy still grieving for his wife who died in a car accident years ago.

1:03.6

Unable to return to work as a professor because of his grief, he decides to work for the company Lumen,

1:09.8

a mysterious conglomerate that performs a controversial

1:12.9

surgery on some of its employees. Workers can choose to get a chip implanted in their brain

1:18.6

that makes them forget about their personal lives when they're at work and their work

1:22.9

lives when they're at home. In the current season, there's some evidence that Mark's wife may not be dead after all,

1:29.7

which only reinforces his desire to quit the company that severed his consciousness.

1:34.7

But his sister Devin, played by Jen Toulock, urges him to stay put and investigate further.

1:41.1

Devin, what are you doing?

...

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