The Pitch: Imagine this: A hot new tech company suddenly finds itself with a new leader. No one knows much about him, but he’s mercurial, impulsive, and gives off an air of efficacious politeness while also seemingly running the business into the ground. Oh, and he immediately fires anyone working from home if they can’t race to the physical office within an hour of announcing.
No, he’s not Elon Musk. But by the time you finish Season 1 of Prime Video’s new puzzle-box thriller The Consultant, you might wish for something as biting as a takedown of tech’s most visibly idiotic goofball.
Adapted from the novel by Bentley Little, The Consultant sees LA-based mobile game company CompWare reeling from the sudden death of their young, temperamental CEO Sang Woo. But the very next day, a mysterious besuited figure named Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz) shows up and plops himself down at the head chair. He’s the new corporate consultant, whose job it is to streamline, innovate, build synergy, and all that good jargonistic stuff.
However, as profits rise, so do tensions, as his results come from Machiavellian manipulation of their glass-enclosed workspace: He pits employees against one another to claim a newly-vacated corner office, and commissions a fully-nude statue of Sang Woo for the employees to “worship.”
Two of the company’s employees, Sang’s former assistant creative liaison Elaine (Brittany O’Grady) and slacker-stoner programmer Craig (Nat Wolff), seem to be the only ones who realize anything’s amiss. Who is this guy, really? What does he want with the company? And why does the glass under his feet creak so when he attempts to climb the stairs?
The Consultant (Prime Video)
