Ben Stiller Listens to ‘Severance’ Fan Podcasts Until They Say Anything Critical
Please try to enjoy each fan podcast equally, and do not show preference only for positive reviews.
As the official prestige mystery box show of the 2020s, Severance is getting the modern version of the same treatment that predecessors like Lost and Westworld received regarding the rampant and unfounded fan speculation about what’s really going on at Lumon Industries. In an an age when seemingly everyone on the internet has a podcast about their favorite TV show (including Severance director Ben Stiller and his star Adam Scott), it’s only natural that the series that deliberately asks more questions than it offers answers would have a thriving ecosystem of discussion podcasts for fans to fill the days in between episode drops and years between seasons.
We’re just two episodes away from the end of Severance Season Two, which will probably end with another massive cliffhanger that will keep fans talking for three years until Season Three premieres. And, when the Severance fandom dissects each individual frame and every line of dialogue from the finale for hidden clues on Spotify shows and Apple Podcasts, Stiller will be listening — at least, until the hosts say anything negative about any part of the series.
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During a recent panel at South by Southwest, Stiller addressed his relationship with the rampant fan speculation surrounding Severance, saying, “It’s dangerous to go there, because there are so many ideas.” Even so, Stiller says he does keep a finger on the pulse of the fandom, just so long as it doesn’t start to get his own blood pumping. “I check in on some of the podcasts and usually listen until they say anything that’s critical of one of the episodes,” Stiller revealed. “Then I stop listening to them and never listen to them again.”
On the topic of the upcoming Severance Season Two finale, Stiller was fittingly opaque, only saying of the last episode for what will probably be a few years, “Things are going to happen. I mean, what can I tell you? The season is going to end soon and hopefully people will be along for the ride.”
And, Stiller clarified, while he considers consuming too much fan feedback to be perilous for his own job performance as Severance’s primary producer and director, he’s still immensely grateful that the podcast-filled online community 2025 has embraced a series that prides itself on being inscrutable. “In this day and age, it’s so hard to have something that breaks through, and that you can actually get people to watch and to see, because there’s so much,” Stiller said of the uphill battle that all shows face nowadays, saying that it wasn’t always this hard to make a hit with so many modern distractions fighting for audiences’ eyeballs. “The movies were the thing when we were kids, and television was television — but there wasn’t all this other stuff out there. … It’s just hard to get people’s attention.”
The podcast culture surrounding TV certainly helps with maintaining interest in shows like Severance that aren’t as immediately grabby and accessible as the kind of online content that continues to eat away at prestige streaming viewership, and Stiller understands that benefit better than most. Case in point, Stiller and Scott have their own Severance breakdown podcast where Stiller doesn’t have to worry about a bad review souring the show for him because he can always just fire any guest who talks back.
