If you’ve ever had a petty tyrant boss, you’ll find plenty to relate to in satirical workplace thriller The Consultant.
Over its eight-episode run, the show digs into corporate intrigue at CompWare, a soulless tech company known for producing addictive, ad-stuffed mobile games. When a literal schoolchild assassinates company’s controlling founder Sang (Brian Yoon) in his office and claims the devil made him do it, mysterious corporate consultant Regus Patoff (a stunningly stone-cold Christoph Walz, known for his Oscar-winning work in Tarantino films like Django Unchained) swoops in to take charge of the company with an iron fist.
Patoff is the beating heart of this show: the question of “who is he?” is integral to the show’s mystery, but his idiosyncratic leadership style adds a dark comedic layer to The Consultant. He’s drunk on his own power, treating the resolution of minor office problems such as a co-worker’s slightly off-putting body odour as if they were akin to achieving world peace. At first glance, Patoff is the archetypal milquetoast corporate consultant: he’s aggressively devoid of any personality beyond his desire to make CompWare an efficient, profit-making machine. He’s the type of painful company man that many of us will recognise, regardless of whether we’ve worked in tech or any other field.
Christoph Waltz in 'The Consultant'. Credit: Michael Desmond / Prime Video
This classic bad boss scenario makes it easy to wade into The Consultant.
But it’s Walz’s superb acting that will make you stick around. He elevates Patoff into a menacingly bland character – this may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s a compelling contradiction that makes Patoff work at the centre of the show’s twin strands of mystery and satire.
Much of Patoff’s strange behaviour is seen through the eyes of two (comparatively) normal employees: coder Craig (an amusingly incredulous Nat Wolff) and Elaine (Brittany O’Grady), a so-called “creative liaison” – a neat nod to ever-more-common fabricated corporate job titles. They occupy front-row seats to Patoff as he settles into the still blood-stained office of his predecessor, unreasonably demanding that his employees get an intercontinental jet to change course, as if he were asking an assistant for coffee. The surreality of it all is given extra weight by Patoff’s often down-to-earth demeanour. Many of us have probably had a corporate job with some dimension of ridiculous pointlessness to its tasks, and The Consultant gives us a dialled-up version of this.
This approach from Waltz and the show's writers results in an unique balancing act when it comes to The Consultant’s genre: on one hand, a clear thread of black comedy, on the other the plot's many mysteries (which can be summed up by the broad question of “what on earth is Patoff’s goal?”).
Elaine (Brittany O’Grady) and Craig (Nat Wolff). Credit: Michael Desmond / Prime Video
There’s more on the line than office politics. With an unpredictable boss, and questions around the original murder that lead to his arrival, no-one at CompWare is sure quite what’s going on. Are they fighting for their jobs, or is there something much more sinister at play?
The Consultant’s bizarro tech workplace means that The Consultant is also a show for people who like maximalist storylines – think of similarly out-there workplace shows like Silicon Valley and Severance as rough analogues. Patoff’s exploits only get more extreme as the story unfolds, for example, as he invites himself to knockoff beers with his employees, only to involve one of them in a kidnapping plot. In turn, this ever-unpredictable behaviour only adds to the fundamental mystery of what’s going on behind the respectable, besuited facade that Patoff puts up.
All of this makes The Consultant into a true mixed-genre series. The mystery and thriller elements propel most of the action forward, but part of the joy of watching comes from the satirical (and perhaps more importantly, relatable) indignities that one corporate consultant can inflict on a workplace. Sure, it has its creepy, dark, and unsettling moments – but that’s life in the kind of dysfunctional workplace that calls for this kind of corporate consulting in the first place.
The Consultant is now streaming at SBS On Demand, with new episodes arriving weekly on Thursday.
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The Consultant
