The Consultant

Knockout. ... A shocking opening sequence establishes an unsettling tone that grabs you from the start, pushing you to gobble up future episodes as if they were leftover salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Christoph Waltz is the show’s ace up its sleeve. He gives his all to create one of the most distinctive villains to grace any series.

Basgallop, who regularly packs an hour's worth of supernatural suspense into under 30 minutes with Servant, keeps the story momentum humming over the eight half-hour episodes. And it helps that said story is marvelously weird and darkly funny.

Waltz isn’t “The Consultant’s” only asset, but everything beyond him feels like a bonus. Even with a few hiccups, watching him work is compensation enough to ensure that this Amazon series earns its stripes.

Even if Waltz’s protagonist is ultimately an easy riddle to decipher, and his tale isn’t as expansive as it could be, The Consultant paints a cynical portrait of 21st-century business as a ruthless arena in which the means always justify the ends. ... Yet in Basgallop and Waltz’s assured hands, it’s nonetheless delivered with a humorous amount of bite.

That might not be for everyone. But with episodes this bite-sized, a cast this charming and a central performance this captivating, you really can't go wrong with giving the first episode a go and judging your appetite for the tone.

The only downside: It all builds to a good-enough conclusion that would work reasonably well as the story's end but leaves a lot of threads dangling (undoubtedly to leave places for future seasons to go) and can't help but feel a little anticlimactic because of it.

Although it seeks to be contemporary in its examination of workplace culture, The Consultant occasionally gets bogged down by incoherence. Heavy-handed symbolism and dramatic distractions muddy the waters on more than one occasion, marring an otherwise intelligent show.

Deeply weird. ... It’s always refreshing to see timely social commentary delivered without a lecture, and the show’s portrait of irrational obedience to authority lands perfectly. But creator Tony Basgallop identifies thematically rich tensions between creativity and commerce, quality and efficiency, kindness and success—all relevant to the contemporary white-collar workplace—without really exploring them.

Its theme, the workplace’s encroachment onto all aspects of one’s personal life, seems as resonant at this moment as ever before. The manner it’s explored is fanciful and at times frankly silly, but it’s just enough to serve as intellectual ballast on a show that’s otherwise (mainly) pleasantly goofy.

Ultimately, it’s not a bad show because it’s never a boring show, but it also feels like it never quite clicks into its full potential.

While deranged enough to be gripping, The Consultant ends up being a little too baggy and chaotic for its own good.

While The Consultant isn’t that funny or scary, and many of the supporting characters are one-dimensional. But if you just like watching Christoph Waltz being weird, this show will have lots and lots of that.

Many questions. But all, I suspect, with answers, and not very complex ones at that. That – along with the spooky basement records room opened by a key with a giant brass keyring stamped “RECORDS”, and a decadent members-only nightclub that has transformed into generic office space by morning and assorted other hokum essentials – is what makes it fun, and perfectly, perfectly fine. As I said: no more, no less.

Unfortunately, the story here is not exceptional. Impressively claustrophobic, dystopian, and discomfiting? Yes, absolutely. But that’s about all it’s got, and that’s not enough.

The show is best when it keeps the action to this space, and, with Prime Video dropping all eight episodes at once, viewers can binge the series as a four-hour movie and easily imagine it as a kind of filmed stage-play. The bugs of this program come in on the level of script and story.

Basgallop’s cross of “Silicon Valley” and “The Devil’s Advocate” doesn’t come together because he hasn’t invested sufficiently in the dramatic infrastructure. We’re left waiting for Regus’s mask to come off and wondering if there will be anything there when it does.

Waltz is a vessel for weirdness, and another part of what makes this series digestible but bland.

[Craig and Elaine's] chemistry is sound and they are the characters in whom we're invested. But even as the Patoff malignancy grows and the casualties mount, the stakes for our heroes remain low, making it unlikely that the audience will commit to the entire enterprise.

At a certain point, The Consultant is counting on Waltz as its exclusive source of humor and terror — and, as familiar as this performance is within his oeuvre, he anchors the long build-up more than capably. If, however, you’re placing that much responsibility on one actor and one character in an eight-episode season, you’d darned well better do something impressive by the end. Or at least interesting. The Consultant does not.

The Consultant doesn’t benefit from [creator Tony Basgallop's] impressive visual style (Matt Shakman’s direction in the pilot is too cold and clinical, despite ostensibly fitting the setting), or the high camp tone of its entire ensemble. Instead, The Consultant is one show you can easily downsize from your media diet.