Disconnection premiered almost three years ago. After a long wait, the Apple TV+ series is finally back with Season 2 – and it’s a bigger phenomenon than its producers and stars could ever have imagined.
The show follows Mark Scout (Adam Scott), who leads a team at the mysterious Lumon Industries, where some employees have undergone a “layoff process” that divides their memories between their work and personal lives. Their “innies” and “outies” have completely different, disjointed experiences with the world, leading to confusion and fear of the innies.
When Scott first heard slang and terminology from the show used in pop culture, he realized that the show had become big. That, and when Janelle Monáe posted about it on X.
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“I just couldn’t believe it. These are things we had been doing for a few years at that point, and suddenly people knew what it meant and cared enough to reference it and use it,” Scott told Yahoo Entertainment. “It surprised me a little bit.”
Enter Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, John Turturro and Britt Lower Disconnection Season 1. (Apple TV+/Courtesy Everett Collection)
From there, they had to start “working in code,” he said, with “highly secret emails and scripts.”
“We made it in a bubble. Nobody cared what we did. Suddenly people were interested in it,” Scott added.
Ben Stiller, the show’s director and executive producer, told Yahoo Entertainment that he knew it was a hit when SZA posted about it. He immediately tagged her later when it was new Disconnection trailer dropped, which seems to be a hint that the two are friends. Stiller starred in the music video for SZA’s new song “Drive” in December.
Britt Lower plays a new ‘innie’ named Helly with a mysterious past, which is revealed at the end of season 1. She knew the show was something special when people started dressing like her for Halloween. For Zach Cherry, who plays Lumon employee Dylan, his moment of realization came when he saw an influx of fan art for his character online.
“It’s one thing to watch a show, and it’s another thing to be so involved that you want to create your own art with it,” Cherry told Yahoo Entertainment.
John Turturro, whose character, Irving, had a romantic arc with a colleague played by Christopher Walken, told Yahoo Entertainment that he usually stays offline, but people started sending him messages from X and Reddit about the two actors’ fictional love affair.
“It got really intimate and I thought, ‘This is a bit much for me,’” he joked. “People said: … ‘Now I see a completely different side of John!’ But it’s clear that it resonates. There are a lot of young people who are really involved.”
It’s not Turturro’s first role that has generated a lot of fan engagement. He warned his co-stars Lower and Cherry that it could go “pretty far.”
“People [who are fans of] The Great Lebowski have tattoos of me all over their bodies in very intimate places, and sometimes they try to show me. And I’m like, ‘I can’t believe my face is next to yours, whatever it is,'” he said. “It’s been going on for twenty years. People have their own fantasy lives… they are ‘cut off’.”
“It’s very embarrassing to see that you’re sitting on someone’s buttocks and inner thigh,” he added with a laugh.
Patricia Arquette in season 1 of Disconnection. (Apple TV+/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Patricia Arquette, who plays now-disgraced Lumon boss Harmony Cobel, told Yahoo Entertainment that she always knew the show was something special, thanks to its “originality.” She thanked the creator and writer, Dan Erickson, for investing so much time and creativity into the project.
Disconnection was Erickson’s first major Hollywood venture. After coming up with the idea for the show in 2012, he started writing it while working at a door factory – a location jokingly mentioned in the show. In 2016, he emailed the script directly to Stiller’s production company. In 2022, the show finally premiered. It’s been a long process, but Erickson has put his time and energy into creating something unique.
Arquette said she noticed how thoughtful and detailed his work was when she was filming a scene in the show’s first season and started looking through a prop book, which was remarkably thorough. It turned out to be a real book that Erickson had written specifically for the show.
“He has gone so deeply into so many aspects of the company and the world. It’s amazing,” she said.
Erickson is enjoying the widespread discussion about the show, but he told Yahoo Entertainment that he wants to stay focused on the “big long-term plans” he outlined with Stiller before they pitched the show to Apple. He hinted that they may have changed a bit, given the long wait between seasons.
Fans just have to tune in to see what happens.
The first episode of season 2 of Disconnection begins streaming on Apple TV+ on January 17.