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.