Prime Video’s The Consultant Is a Little Weird, a Little Unsettling, and Mostly Mediocre

I’ll say this for Amazon Prime Video’s The Consultant—it keeps you watching for longer than you should because you really want to know exactly what the hell is going on. A responsible critic watches 2-3 episodes of a show before writing a review, at least, and at the end of the third episode, I can report a faint impulse to keep going, to sink deeper into the strangeness and the mystery of whatever it was I had just spent almost two hours puzzling over. But hot on the heels of that thought came the correction: I actually am not enjoying it very much, so maybe I’ll read about it on Wikipedia one day. (Note: probably not.)

That’s the basic headline here: Intriguing, but frustrating to the point that the payoff juice doesn’t seem worth the commitment squeeze.

What’s kind of annoying about this show is that nothing is really done poorly, per se. Sitting squarely in the “dark workplace comedy” genre, this is the story of CompWare, a game design company whose CEO, a reclusive South Korean genius, is shot and killed in the opening minutes by a child who blames/credits the devil. As the company begins to disintegrate, a mysterious consultant who calls himself Regus Patoff (“it’s Crimean,” he says) enters, occupying the main office and insisting that the show will go on. Played by Christoph Waltz, Patoff is a deeply disturbing character, and the chief pleasure of this show is watching Waltz let his creep flag fly. He is very good, and by “very good” I mean “very disturbing,” in some very fun ways.

The Consultant is notable for its lack of prominent characters, and the rest of the action mostly revolves around Elaine (Brittany O’Grady), the self-appointed “creative liaison” to the CEO and then Patoff, and Craig (Nat Wolff), a frustrated designer who is at first annoyed, then taken in, and finally terrified by the new consultant. Both characters are fine, both actors are fine, and the same can be said for the only other even remotely prominent figure in the first three episodes, Craig’s fiancee Patti, played by Aimee Carrero.