After a long wait, Breakup is back. Season 2 premiered on Apple TV Plus on January 17, more than two years after the first season ended. The wait was especially tough because of how the season 1 finale ended – a huge cliffhanger that would completely upend almost everyone’s lives in this sci-fi thriller. Cliffhangers are a tricky business. They can help keep viewers interested in what comes next, but they can also be frustrating, seeming to withhold information for the sole purpose of keeping people hooked.
Breakup has managed this balance well so far, and I had the chance to speak to some members of the creative team behind the series – creator Dan Erickson, director Ben Stiller and star Adam Scott – about how they succeeded. “Honestly, it’s just kind of a guess in your mind,” Stiller says. The edge. “You try to think about the stakes we’ve set, and I hope you’ll have earned it by the end.”
One of the trickiest parts for BreakupAt least initially, it was because the team didn’t really know how the public would react. It’s a strange series that follows a group of office workers whose brains have been surgically altered to separate their professional and private lives. This, in essence, creates two selves: those who live in the external world (outies); and those confined to the basement office of Lumon Industries (innies). Things only get weirder from there, involving everything from an office goat pen to a terribly disturbing dance party. Although the series eventually found an audience, this was not achieved during production.
“We did the whole season in a bubble where no one saw anything until it was over, and we didn’t even know if anyone would react to the show,” Stiller says. “I remember the ending of episode 8 of season 1 was a cliffhanger. And I remember thinking “that’s a really good cliffhanger, I wonder if people will think the end of episode 9 is a good cliffhanger too.” Will this all add up for people? Fortunately, this is the case.
Scott, who plays Mark on the show and is also a producer, echoes this, saying, “It’s a roll of the dice whether something is going to work or not.” The idea is to design the show so that it builds up to those big moments, and then hope that it connects the way you intended. “There’s all this architecture building up to this moment in Episode 9,” Scott explains. “I remember when we were filming the finale and shooting the scene where Mark walks past (Harmony Cobel, played by Patricia Arquette) and calls her a bad name, and talks to Ben and Patricia and just says, ‘If they’re still with us at this point, it’s going to be so great.’
“It’s a crapshoot whether something works or not.”
Part of what made the Season 1 finale work, Erickson says, is that it managed to both answer questions and introduce new ones. This gave viewers an intriguing combination of satisfaction and mystery. For those who haven’t seen it… spoilers ahead! – in the ninth and final episode of season 1, Mark and his colleagues do something forbidden: enter the outside world as themselves. There they learn all kinds of important information about who they really are. Mark, in particular, discovers that his wife, whom he thought was dead in the outside world, is actually living an interrupted life in Lumon under the new name Mrs. Casey. The episode ends with just this shocking revelation.
“With Mark, that last moment of ‘she’s alive,’ in a way, it answers a question; the question was always whether he would discover Mrs. Casey and whether he would be able to send a message to the outside world that she is out there,” says Erickson. “We are getting answers to these questions. But this then opens a whole new question: what to do now? How will this change the status quo internally and externally?
While the wait has been long, season 2 of Breakup picks up right after that point, so you finally get some answers – but of course, there are plenty more in store.
