“The Consultant,” an amusing trifle on Amazon Prime Video that burns through most of its dark-comic capital before its eight episodes are up, is set during a critical moment at a tech company: when new, “competent” management takes over for the brilliant but callow founder.
It’s a Tim Cook-Steve Jobs scenario — there’s even a scene involving a sledgehammer, to reinforce the Apple connection — with a twist that both gives the show its satirical energy and limits the reach of its dark humor. The evil new boss, a silver-haired suit named Regus (Christoph Waltz), is actually evil: He arrives, like Old Scratch, with a contract and finagles the leader of a struggling video-game company into signing it, thereby bartering away the business. (The young technocrat doesn’t appear to have a soul to give up.)
“The Consultant” was created and written by the British screenwriter Tony Basgallop, based on a novel by Bentley Little, and it is in the vein of his previous American series, “Servant” on Apple TV+. Basgallop dresses up basic horror premises with curlicues of mordant, deadpan humor, and creates an ambient pea soup of unease that, for his well-employed but economically insecure young characters, constitutes a reign of terror. Key to the formula is the coy refusal to specify whether what we’re seeing is supernatural malevolence or simply really bad behavior.
“Servant,” a creepy-babysitter drama that counts M. Night Shyamalan among its executive producers, succeeded in its early going largely on the basis of Lauren Ambrose’s antic, fearless performance as a frantic tiger mom. “The Consultant” doesn’t have that kind of energy at its center — Waltz, recycling his oddball cultivated-creepy persona for the umpteenth time, is amusing but not much more as the coldblooded, possibly diabolical capitalist.
You can’t really blame Waltz, though, because there’s not much to the character beyond the idea of boss as devil. Basgallop and his collaborators, who include the director Matt Shakman (“WandaVision”), seem to have started with that notion and then worked, with diminishing results, to stretch it out in a way that didn’t answer any questions and left open the possibility of a second season.
The satire of the tech industry is microchip thin, though often clever in its specifics. The almost entirely faceless staff of CompWare are uniformly indolent and feckless; Regus, who knows nothing about the product or the business, treats the office as a jungle and sets the workers against one another like players in one of the company’s games. In an industry that prides itself on its unconventionality, he’s the real chaos agent. But he’s also an unrepentant Luddite, or maybe just an ancient soul — he refers to a phone as “your hand device” and lovingly, manually sharpens a long row of pencils. (The pencils, like the stairs leading to Regus’s office, are a suggestive blood red.)
Just a handful of performers, besides Waltz, have roles of any significance. His primary co-stars are Brittany O’Grady (“White Lotus”) and Nat Wolff (“The Stand”) as Elaine, an executive assistant, and Craig, a coder. They are the only employees who bother to act on their suspicions of Regus, whose plans appear to extend beyond CompWare in lurid and possibly apocalyptic ways.
Their investigation of him provides most of the show’s plot as well as a semblance of thematic complexity. Elaine is a loyal corporate soldier who tries to temper Regus’s crueler impulses while angling for a better title; Craig is a smart but lazy man-child opposed to any exercise of authority that threatens his good times. (Wolff gives the show’s liveliest performance.) The ability of the two to work together for a larger good is a test of Regus’s beliefs about human nature.
Some of Basgallop’s ideas pay dividends — Regus’s tone-deaf commitment to keeping his bargain with the CompWare founder has droll results — and there’s pleasure in the arch, offhand way Waltz puts across his character’s old-world weirdness. (When Regus discovers that one of his employees is lesbian, he tells the assembled work force, “Ursula lies with a woman.”) But 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.
Mike Hale
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