The New Yorker:

TV’s preëminent office guy has never worked a “regular nine-to-five,” but his years as a struggling actor taught him what it’s like to toil anonymously.

By Rachel Syme

In late 2012, Dan Erickson was a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring screenwriter in L.A., working a dull job in office management at a door-parts company. Day after day, he sat at a computer monitor cataloguing hinges and cabinet pulls. He longed to escape the drudgery, but he needed the money; he was saddled with debt, and drove a dinky scooter to save on gas. One morning, while walking into work, Erickson had a thought: What if I could skip ahead to the end of the day, and my work would magically be done? During his lunch breaks, he began turning this idea into a pilot for a high-concept workplace thriller called “Severance.” The result was part “The Office,” part “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” A sinister corporation called Lumon Industries has invented a microchip brain implant that can bisect a person’s consciousness into an “innie” and an “outie”—an office self and a home self. Lumon employees who choose to have the implant installed work on a subterranean “severed floor” of Lumon’s headquarters. The chip is activated as they ride an elevator down, erasing their knowledge of their outside lives. Their home selves, in turn, know nothing of what happens within the office’s walls. The show’s protagonist, Mark Scout, is a severed man toiling in Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement Department, sorting numbers into arbitrary groupings. Outside the office, his outie is a bereft widower who chose to sever his mind just to get some emotional relief. At work, his innie is upbeat, affable, on task—and, like his severed co-workers, effectively trapped forever at the office, by design.

From the time Erickson began writing the script, he had the actor Adam Scott in mind for the role. Erickson had admired Scott’s performance in the hit NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” as Ben Wyatt, a geeky budget adviser who ultimately wins the heart of the show’s protagonist, the bubbly bureaucrat Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler). “Parks,” along with the cult comedy series “Party Down,” about a group of failed actors turned cater waiters, helped establish Scott as an endearing version of TV’s working Everyman, whose sardonic veneer belies an inner core of hopeful sweetness. This métier has been defined, in part, by Scott’s physical appearance, which straddles the line between hunky and nondescript—medium height, slightly hangdog eyes, thick chestnut hair that juts like a cockatiel’s crest. As Michael Schur, the co-creator of “Parks,” put it to me, “He’s memorable in unmemorable parts.” “Severance,” an office dystopia, needed a guy regular enough to ground viewers in the rules of its heightened sci-fi world but intriguing enough to make you suspect that he’s more than a drone.

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