‘Severance’ Composer Theodore Shapiro on How He Invented the Show’s Familiar Theme for Season 2’s Twisty Plotlines
In the season twofinale of Severance, Mark S (Adam Scott) and Helly R (Britt Lower) have a hushed conversation at their dimly lit cubicles, a quiet moment that is pregnant with an emotional tidal wave, accompanied by Theodore Shapiro’s delicate piano theme for the characters and some trembling strings, slowly building to a heartbreaking crescendo.
This is immediately followed by the ’80s-licious synth licks of “Eye in the Sky” by The Alan Parsons Project, a ridiculous in-world soundtrack for an office celebration featuring a clunky animatronic figure, which is then interrupted by an entire marching band pounding and blaring out an original composition by Shapiro called “The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnel.”
In other words: It’s Severance in a nutshell.
Shapiro won his first Emmy for his season one score, and he’s nominated again for season two’s “Cold Harbor” episode. (Severance led the Emmy nominations this year, with a whopping 27 nods.)His hypnotic, addictive theme for the series — which also was nominated for an Emmy in 2022 — has broken out of its box and into YouTube covers and TikTok videos, becoming one of the most recognized and sticky TV themes of the streaming age.
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For season two, Shapiro says he wanted to treat that twisty theme, which is somehow both paranoid and seductive, as the trunk of a tree — “the foundation of the music,” he explains, “and just have new branches that are going out. That meant coming up with new harmonic variations on the theme, new melodic variations on the theme and new timbres that I could work with.”
For Mark and Helly, the two “innies” at the heart of the show, he extended the theme’s familiar four chords into seven — giving their developing dynamic, and the strange intrusion of Helena Eagan (Helly’s “outie”), a sad, sensual complexity.
He also wrote a new theme for Gretchen (Merritt Wever) and Dylan G (Zach Cherry). It started as a kind of spa music for the “visitation suite” where the two characters meet, in a style befitting Lumon Industries’ culty-corporate aesthetic. “It was something that attached really beautifully to that storyline,” says Shapiro. “It had kind of a strange character that was somewhat beautiful and somewhat off.” In the season finale, as Dylan reads a letter from his outie, the theme reprises with emotional force.
Shapiro’s goal for season two was, in essence, development: “Which both feels apt to me in terms of the music and developing the language of it,” he says, “but it also feels apt for what the show is doing and the development of the characters. Specifically, you can think of Helly’s story as going from birth at the beginning of season one to adolescence in season two.”
The go-to collaborator for Severance’s chief director, Ben Stiller, ever since Tropic Thunder in 2008, Shapiro synced up with the show’s unusual frequency when he came up with those four looping chords and the slightly discordant theme tune — although his original idea was much more electronic. But when Shapiro demoed it on piano, Stiller recognized a spiritual cousin to David Shire’s lonely, somewhat jazzy solo piano score for The Conversation.
That 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film and other ’70s paranoia thrillers were major influences on the show’s broader aesthetic and tone. “There is a connection between Mark’s isolation,” Shapiro says, “particularly his outie’s isolation in the show and the type of isolation that you find in films like The Conversation.”
The piano became even more central in season two — “It really defined what Ben saw as the sound of the show,” Shapiro says — but the composer also wanted to explore beyond its ordinary beauty. He sampled a variety of sounds — percussive, harsh, droning — created inside and outside the instrument, which he then played from a computer.
The only live instruments on the score are strings, performed by violinist Rob Moose and cellist Gabriel Cabezas. Shapiro kicked things off with an experimental session where he would give them a chord progression or a rhythmic idea and have them improvise.
“A lot of the sounds that Rob makes are these kind of glassy harmonics that can be really strange,” Shapiro explains. “They can be really pure and glassy, and they can be weird and wobbly, and sometimes they transition from one of those characteristics to another — and it’s just a big part of the sound of the show.”
In addition to the marching band medley, Shapiro also composed all of the hilariously cursed muzak (a brand of background music used in commercial settings) of Lumon Industries and the creepy, liturgical music for the Eagan religion. (He spent more than two years composing the score for the belated sophomore season.)
“Over the course of the two seasons, we’ve started to amass this collection of Kier hymns,” he says, noting that “we don’t know who Ambrose and Gunnel [key figures at Lumon Industries] are yet — we might find out.”
Severance is such a strange stew of the absurd, the melancholy and the profound — an allegory for addiction, for repressed trauma, for personhood — and it can be quirky and funny one second and emotionally devastating the next. Shapiro plays a vital role in navigating all of those disparate moods and modes and in making them cohere. His music is the emotional thermostat of Mark and Helly’s world — inside and out.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
