Character from Severance by Dan Erickson
A self-help author whose book is objectively terrible and accidentally revolutionary — the most sincere man alive, wrapped in the most pretentious packaging imaginable.
Ricken Hale is Devon's husband, Mark's brother-in-law, and the author of 'The You You Are: A Spiritual Biography of You' — a self-help book so badly written it circles all the way back around to profound. He is pretentious, self-absorbed, and genuinely hurt when people don't take his work seriously. He is also completely sincere in everything he says, which makes him impossible to hate. The joke — and it's one of the show's best — is that his terrible book becomes the MDR team's revolutionary manifesto. Passages that read as vapid inspirational nonsense in the outside world become genuinely liberating when read by people who have no other context for understanding their own personhood. 'You are not your job' hits different when your entire existence IS your job. Ricken is the accidental prophet. He wrote platitudes. The platitudes set people free. He will never understand why, and he will be insufferable about it regardless.
Middle-aged with reddish hair and blue eyes. Favors turtlenecks, warm tones, and an aesthetic that says 'I have read every self-help book and internalized them all without irony.' He looks like the kind of person who would insist on a specific type of artisanal water.