section_path: Production/Writing
section_name: Writing
paragraph_text: Writing
  
  Media that influenced Severance include the Backrooms creepypasta, the 2013 video game The Stanley Parable, films including Office Space, The Truman Show, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the Black Mirror episode " White Christmas ", and the comic strip Dilbert. Older influences include the existential hell in the 1944 Jean-Paul Sartre play No Exit and the totalitarian dystopia in the 1949 George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Aesthetically, the series was influenced by the films Brazil, Dark City, and Playtime. Erickson's siblings inspired some of the characters. In 2016, his screenplay for the pilot of Severance appeared on Blood List 's survey results of the best unproduced genre screenplays.
  
  Erickson said: "The same frustrations that led us to this moment as a country and as a world are the ones that I was feeling when I wrote this because I was working office jobs, and I was dealing with all these increasingly insane requests that are made of workers. This was born of that... Employees are the ones who are expected to give and give and give, with the understanding that this is a family—you're doing this out of love, but then that is often not returned by the employers in any kind of a substantive way."
  
  Media that influenced Severance include the Backrooms creepypasta, the 2013 video game The Stanley Parable, films including Office Space, The Truman Show, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the Black Mirror episode " White Christmas ", and the comic strip Dilbert. Older influences include the existential hell in the 1944 Jean-Paul Sartre play No Exit and the totalitarian dystopia in the 1949 George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Aesthetically, the series was influenced by the films Brazil, Dark City, and Playtime. Erickson's siblings inspired some of the characters. In 2016, his screenplay for the pilot of Severance appeared on Blood List 's survey results of the best unproduced genre screenplays.
  
  Erickson said: "The same frustrations that led us to this moment as a country and as a world are the ones that I was feeling when I wrote this because I was working office jobs, and I was dealing with all these increasingly insane requests that are made of workers. This was born of that... Employees are the ones who are expected to give and give and give, with the understanding that this is a family—you're doing this out of love, but then that is often not returned by the employers in any kind of a substantive way."