The Severance creator sees the revolution potential in self-help books
It would be easy to dismiss Ricken’s self-help book, The You You Are, in the first season of Severance — it is, in fact, what happens a lot as the copy Ricken (Michael Chernus) leaves on his brother-in-law Mark’s doorstep shuffles from one person to the next. Without even receiving a copy, Mark (Adam Scott) is ready to scoff at Ricken’s attempts to philosophize his way through the world.
But Severance creator Dan Erickson isn’t so sure. To him, the book represented more than a silly joke. And to that end, he never wanted the book to be just a funny voiceover.
“It’s obviously a sort of heightened take on a self-help book,” Erickson tells Polygon in a Zoom interview. “[But] I didn’t want it to be so silly that it felt out of the world. And also with this knowledge that it was going to become a serious plot device later on. So we wanted to write something that, taken out of context, could believably inspire people and had ideas under that bluster that maybe had actual value to them.”
To him, Ricken’s ideas represent an important undercurrent of the show: making the mundane startlingly, stiltedly profound. When Chernus’ buttery voiceover reminds us that “Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall, but, my friends, the hour is yours,” it’s at once corny and provocative. (Erickson’s favorite of Chernus’ delivery is: “Machines are made of metal, but man is made of skin.”)
That delicate balance for a self-help guide set the tone for how Chernus thought of Ricken as a character. The first thing he shot in 2020 was the book cover, which is all flashy, “Dianetics, or like Tony Robbins,” and “vaguely cult-y” with its bright colors. (“Self-help maybe isn’t even right,” he says. “It’s sort of like
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