Do you have an idea in your head how this show will end?

i do that. I have a scene in mind that's kind of largely unchanged since I first brought the show to Ben (Stiller) and I told him and he said, "Oh, that's pretty good." They changed a lot about the plan. I'm not going to pretend it's a structurally perfect thing from day one. We've examined it and updated it as we've gone along, but the skeleton and the bottom line, that's kind of been our North Star from the beginning.

How specific is your vision of the end? Do you know where each character ends up, do you just have a broad idea of ​​what's going to happen, or do you only have the final moments in your mind? Because TV is such a fun medium in that it's so fluid and obviously there are stories about it Jesse Pinkman on "Breaking Bad," that character who shoots in such a big and unexpected way, and the whole show is completely different because of it. So obviously you leave yourself room to change things on the fly, but how specific is your vision of how you want this to end up?

Yes, you can definitely under-plan a show like this, but you can also over-plan. And if you're too rigidly stuck to your original conception of it, then you can really hinder your progress. i mean my original version of the script was very differentand before I brought it to Ben, there was a version that was much more amped up. It was closer to something like "Brazil" or almost like something out of Monty Python where it was dark, but then there was this almost magical realism. And if I had been obsessively married to it, we would never have gotten the show we got.

So you have to take the lesson and use it to move forward and remember that there might be a better version of this that you don't know yet and you have to be open to that. And you have to let yourself fall in love with certain characters or other elements of the story that you didn't expect, and be able to think on your feet and weave them into the narrative and be like, "Okay, no I don't expect us to love this one." man, but now we can't do the show without him, so what's his role in the rest of this thing?

So with all that said - and this is the last question I'll ask you about the ending - how many seasons do you think make sense for The Severns as a whole?

We have a number in mind. I think that's all I can say.

Okay, fair enough.

We have a pretty good number in mind that - we're not positive. It's like, "Maybe we'll do more, but it'll probably be this number."

Gotcha. All right. So tell me about working with Keanu Reeves on the "Lumon Listens" video in the season two premiere. I'm pretty sure it was Keanu. He's not credited in the first episode, but he sure sounded a lot like him.

(sly) Well, I certainly have no idea what you could be talking about. I am actually not familiar with that actor.

i see

Is that the guy from The Lake House?

(laughs) It is, actually.

I love The Lake House.

Okay, so that line of questioning obviously goes nowhere. (laughs)