How Apple TV’s Sci-Fi Hit Crafted The Ultimate Secret…

The second season of Severance might have been bigger, bolder, and darker than its predecessor, but it still maintained the four ominous chords that instantly set the Apple TV+ sci-fi show apart from the rest. That motif is the foundation for Severance’s trippy opening titles, and it’s become the soundtrack to a tidal wave of memes taking social media by storm.

Though Severance has its chuckle-inducing moments, it’s largely a drama — but that hasn’t stopped its fandom from having fun with its source material. That irony is not lost on composer Theodore Shapiro, who worked on a handful of comedies alongside director Ben Stiller before taking on Severance. Shapiro reveals that Stiller helped pick those four chords out of a song he’d previously composed. That it’s come to define the series in such unexpected (and hilarious) ways — from bossa nova remixes to skits praising the hotness of the cast — feels like a full-circle moment for the duo.

“I’m not on TikTok, but a bunch of things have made their way to me,” Shapiro tells Inverse. “‘Mark is hot, Helly’s hot…’ I probably will never hear the theme again without hearing those words in my mind.”

In Season 2, Shapiro delivers another excellent soundtrack for a show that continues to evolve. Though it’s his first “serious” sci-fi project, he argues that there’s no difference between his approach here and his previous work with Tropic Thunder or Dodgeball. In an interview with Inverse, Shapiro sits down to explore the differences between comedy and drama soundtracks, Severance’s new sound, and the joys of Choreography and Merriment.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Shapiro speaks at a panel for Severance at the DGA Theater. | Rich Polk/Deadline/Getty Images

You’ve collaborated with Ben Stiller on a handful of movies throughout the years. I’d love to know where your creative partnership began.

It really began in 2004. Ben called me, sort of out of the blue, to ask if I wanted to work on Dodgeball, which Ben didn’t direct, but he was a very involved producer. The movie is really funny, and it just kind of needed a composer’s touch to make the dodgeball scenes feel really epic and feel like a sports drama. Just the presence of a film composer doing their job and elevating the scenes to where they needed to be, I think, brought the whole movie together in a way.

People tend to overlook a comedy score, assuming it’s all sound cues or strings. But I find that, especially if you go back to the comedies in the early 2000s, music was doing so much heavy lifting.

I mean, you’re singing my song there. There definitely have been times where it’s been very, very evident that work on a comedy is not really treated as real film composing. People think that the music is satirical, even when the music is not satirical. To my mind, with a few small exceptions, the film score for Tropic Thunder is a very serious action score, and the score to Spy is a serious spy score. My approach to comedy has always been to be the straight man and to treat the storytelling like it was a drama. You are trying to help the filmmaker tell their story.

The four chords in Severance’s main theme created a strong foundation for the score as a whole. | Apple TV

A lot of the composers that we celebrate now got their start in comedy, too. I’m thinking of Ludwig Göransson: He was doing shows like Community and New Girl before Black Panther and Oppenheimer.

It’s funny that you mentioned Ludwig, because he started out as my assistant. We are still very close colleagues. We work out of the same studio, and I would say that we share a pretty similar type of approach. We talk about this all the time, especially if we’re talking to young composers, that working on comedy is a gift for a film composer because it’s really the hardest thing to do. Even if it’s considered to not be the classiest of genres, it’s something that is really, really helpful to do.

That’s incredible. So how did your work on Severance begin?

At the end of 2019, Ben called me up to ask about the show. And at that point, I had actually already heard a little bit about it from Adam Scott, who I know through our kids — they go to school together. It sounded like a great idea, and I was hoping that Ben might call me, and he did. In February of 2020, right before the pandemic hit, I went to New York, and Ben and I sat in a room and listened to a lot of the music that I had written up until then. This was still when I was exploring the idea of writing very electronic, cold music for inside Lumon and more organic music for outside of Lumon.

Because Ben has such great instincts, whenever he responds to something, I’m always attentive to it. So it was this B section of this electronic piece that was built around four chords. And when I came back to Los Angeles from New York, I sat down and played those four chords at the piano. That became the opening four chords of the main title theme. It was just an “aha” moment that I got into sideways, and that’s how we started on this path.

The new sounds in Severance Season 2 come from the same source: a piano. | Apple TV

Severance Season 2 goes to much darker places sonically. How did you integrate new sounds as the story continues?

There are a lot of sounds in the season that really came out of sketches that had the forest in mind. I work really closely with a sound designer named Chris Lane, and he made a new batch of sounds for Season 2. All of the sounds that he made came from a piano, because we wanted to delve in deeper to the idea of the piano as the core of the sound of the show. He’s made all these sounds that sound percussive, but they’re really sort of his manipulations, like hitting the side of the piano. It all emanates from the same sound source. He did amazing work that gave Season 2 a new identity.

The marching band moment at the end of Season 2 was huge for so many reasons. Did you write the hymn and ballad for the band to perform?

Yes, both the marching band version of “The Kier Hymn” and “The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnell” were written for this one group, Brooklyn United. And it was so much fun to do. I don’t have any experience writing marching band music, so it was like a new world to dive into. Ben played me some examples from the movie Drumline, the Nick Cannon movie, which he really likes, so that was kind of my north star.

“The Kier Hymn” and “The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnell,” I think of both of those as religious hymns related to the Eagan mythology. It was just really fun to superimpose those themes on top of this marching band core and drumline. It was something that emerged in the middle of the season. I think when we were on hiatus for the strikes, it was just a left turn that we got to run.

The marching band moment in Season 2 was inspired by Drumline. | Apple TV

Severance Season 3 is now in the works. Have you started writing new music yet, or are you waiting on the writers?

I definitely will start writing in between, but probably the kickoff to that will be when I start hearing about where the story is going. I’ll just let that be my guide. From Season 1 into Season 2, we really went from something that was almost completely monothematic to something that had sprouted into different themes. Hopefully we can just keep growing all of those ideas outward in different directions. There’ll be new themes, and the goal will be to keep what is core to Severance but also to keep evolving. I’m sure that’s what the writer’s goal is, and that will be my goal too.

Severance is now streaming on Apple TV+.