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THE BUZZ ON WHAT TO WATCH, READ & LISTEN TO THIS WEEK!

- Tom Gliatto, LIZZ SCHUMER,Contributors BOOKS WADZANAI MHUTE, MARION WINIK BROADWAY DAVE QUINN

Severance | APPLE TV+

Adam Scott resumes his fight against a conglomerate’s deadly monkey business

FANTASY

In season 1 of this dystopian nightmare, Mark (Adam Scott) was a number cruncher at Lumon Industries, an office complex so antiseptically cold it could be a morgue. (Is it?) Complying with Lumon’s secret protocols, Mark had allowed his consciousness to be split into intellectually exclusive halves: His so-called innie was awake solely when he worked. His outie, on the other hand, knew only Mark’s lonely domestic life as a widower. But then Mark stumbled on a personally devastating corporate slipup: A coworker, a Ms. Casey (the gorgeously enigmatic Dichen Lachman), had vanished from Lumon, and—in a synaptic mindblower—Mark learned that she was also his supposedly dead outie wife, Gemma.

Instead of doing the sensible thing—appearing on Dr. Phil—in season 2, Mark triggers a management crisis that lands in the lap of Milchick (Tramell Tillman), a man of unctuous charm but perhaps not the requisite cutthroat amorality. While life at Lumon grows ever darker and even more warped, Mark searches, as both innie and outie, for Ms. Casey/Gemma—a quest that gives the show some of the odd, heart-stirring power of the myth of Orpheus’s attempted rescue of bride Eurydice from the underworld. (It’s a botch. Orpheus should have called Dr. Phil.) Without stinting on “Wait—what?” surprises, the story has deepened into a dramatic mystery. It’ll vex your innie for days. Outie too. (Premiere episode launches Jan. 17)

The Room Next Door | IN THEATERS

DRAMA