The Consultant

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.