Someone should fire The Consultant
Graham Hillard
Disappointingly, Amazon Prime’s new series The Consultant is not a raucous sendup of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s McKinsey years. That at least might have been entertaining. What the show is instead is difficult to say. Think The Office stripped of its zany charm. Or a David Lynch remake of The Devil Wears Prada.
The series unfolds at a Los Angeles video game firm called CompWare, where an army of drones labors to execute the vision of founder-genius Ahn Sang-woo (Brian Yoon). As the pilot opens, a flock of middle school students has arrived to tour the premises. Just another day in Big Tech? Not exactly. For reasons we can only guess at, one of the students produces a handgun and shoots Sang in the head.
Duly present for this catastrophe are two of CompWare’s most reliable workers. Craig (Nat Wolff) is a bored coder in love with his compensation package but held back by the firm’s top-down style. Elaine (Brittany O’Grady), Sang’s comely assistant, is building her tech resume one inflated job title at a time. On the evening after Sang’s death, the pair are burning the midnight oil when a mysterious stranger arrives bearing a briefcase and a professional frown. His name: Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz). His task: Advise Sang and CompWare “on all matters of business.”
Had The Consultant contented itself to be a mere anti-capitalist satire, it might have achieved adequate if not remarkable heights. Taking command of the firm on the basis of his contract, Patoff begins by calling all remote employees back to the office and locking out a wheelchair-bound straggler. One imagines him at the height of the pandemic, hiding the hand sanitizer and dispensing with masks. Alas, Patoff is far more than a comically bad boss for our post-pandemic age. As Craig and Elaine soon discover, their new CEO’s deal with Sang was anything but aboveboard. (Send the children out of the room when the pair watch a recording of the, um, negotiation.) Similarly damning is Patoff’s connection to a recently decapitated Russian, a subplot that raises any number of ripped-from-the-headlines geopolitical questions.
The effect of this narrative disjointedness is a show that neither knows its own mind nor succeeds at any one thing. Casting her gaze toward CompWare’s literal glass ceiling, Elaine is an obvious proxy for Big Tech’s female “victims,” passed over for enrichment by a clique of frat boy founders. Yet what does that ideological proposition have to do with the series’s insistence that Patoff is a veritable Bond villain, kidnapping nightclub tarts and manipulating the prosthetic limb market in Siberia?
Exacerbating this schizophrenic design is the truly terrible performance by Waltz in the leading role. Though I have never been a fan of the Austrian German’s deranged Captain von Trapp shtick, it is especially obnoxious here and lends an element of silliness to even the show’s serious moments. Yes, Waltz is the man you want when Patoff, channeling Joe Biden, begins to sniff his employees. But far less believable are the scenes that require legitimate menace. Despite numerous chances, Waltz hasn’t delivered that since 2009’s Inglourious Basterds.
To be fair, the actor is hamstrung by The Consultant’s writing, pacing, and near-total lack of logical coherence. Why do Craig and Elaine stick with CompWare despite Patoff’s obvious insanity? Why is much of an early episode set in a private club, where Craig and Patoff exchange awkward small talk to no obvious end? Is Patoff even human, or does his inability to, say, climb a flight of stairs betoken some stranger identity? Most importantly, who cares? In its attempt to blend parody and high intrigue, the show fails at both. The former lowers the dramatic stakes, while the latter stifles any humor that might otherwise have broken through.
Given its winking workplace cynicism, The Consultant may remind some viewers of Severance, Apple TV+’s 2022 saga of tech-corporation malfeasance. So inferior is Amazon’s production, however, that the comparison barely holds for half an hour. To be sure, Apple’s series wins the casting battle, as well as medals for set design and the ability to generate real tension. Yet Severance’s true superiority lies in its capacity to deliver sci-fi storytelling without sacrificing emotional clarity. The Consultant, by contrast, fails to develop even one likable or interesting character. God only knows what its drab protagonists actually want.
If all of this feels like a waste rather than a simple artistic flop, that may be because the McKinsey ethos is so ripe for a takedown. “They worm their way in with the top CEOs,” Craig says in one of The Consultant’s few good lines, “and, before you know it, the mission statement’s been translated into Klingon.”
Good stuff, right? Let’s make that show.
Graham Hillard is the author of Wolf Intervals (Poiema Poetry Series) and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.