The Consultant

Stars Nat Wolff, Christoph Waltz, Aimee Carrero and Brittany O'Grady, along with the creators of "The Consultant," discuss the show's portrayal of workplace ...

"I think that they have a sense of intimacy at work," O'Grady said. "Christoph said to Tony, 'I think I'd like some more scenes with Nat,'" Wolff said. "Executive produce sounds like I initiated this thing," Waltz said. "Everyone's facing the same thing, the same hierarchical pressures, the same kind of demands from your boss," Basgallop said. If I say no, then I can't pay my rent or I can't feed my family." "There's a lot to talk about."

The Consultant is a dark comedy series by Tony Basgallop (Servant), based on the novel of the same name written by Bentley Little. The premiere was directed by ...

There is lots of potential for a second season, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Prime Video announces it in the coming weeks. The renewal status of The Consultant is still to be confirmed and is currently pending over at Prime Video HQ. There’s a bigger world to be explored, and we have only just scratched the surface of Regus and his seedy past. Will The Consultant be a hit for Prime Video, following Tony Basgallop’s successes with Servant at Apple TV+, or will it just be another one-off series canceled before its time by its streaming platform? The Consultant puts forth many mysteries and an array of cleverly formed twists, but whether it will grip viewers to the same degree remains to be seen. And just like the Apple Original series Servant, audiences will be left mystified, this time by the central character of Regus Patoff and his many tantalizing secrets.

Is it a thriller? A satire? A comedy? Whatever this dark workplace-set series is, its lead actor is certainly unsettling in his impeccable suit and tie.

He is also super-ruthless, firing remote workers who cannot return to the office within an hour (including a wheelchair-using employee who misses the cutoff by seconds), and another for smelling of “putrid fruit”. The first thing we see in The Consultant is a group of middle-schoolers visiting cool gaming company CompWare, only for one of their pre-pubescent number to draw a gun on the founder/CEO Sang (Brian Yoon) and shoot him dead. I’m very out of the loop. Though he was signatory to a similar contract with a prosthetics manufacturer who then ended up decapitated (Thriller!). Thriller, thinks the audience. Before the blood is even off the walls (CompWare’s cleaning service does not cover such eventualities – capitalism!

Prime Video's newest series, The Consultant, is a dark comedy thriller set in a tech office. Here's what time new episodes will be available to stream.

If you don’t see new episodes readily available at this time, they’ll be added at midnight in your local time zone on February 24. Several of their past series have dropped at midnight GMT, which means viewers in North America would be able to stream the series in the evening before the premiere date. [set in a tech workplace](https://hiddenremote.com/2022/04/08/severance-season-2-next-episode-severance-coming/).

The Consultant has just dropped on Prime Video today. What are the chances of the Christoph Waltz series being renewed for Season 2?

That’s going to be the initial number Amazon is going to look at. The drawing point of this series is Waltz in the lead. It was always going to be hard for Amazon to make a decision about the series ahead of it dropping.

The newest entry into TV's booming “work is hell” genre stars the Oscar winner as another mysterious eccentric.

[keep banging this drum](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/10/5-signs-your-tv-show-should-be-a-movie-and-2-signs-it-shouldnt), but this story seems like it would have been better suited to a feature film; once you start seeing the holes in the central mystery, the show that surrounds them doesn’t offer enough reasons to keep watching. (And there’s no indication from marketing materials that this show was intended to be a limited series.) Why spend hours of your leisure time with frustrating characters in a claustrophobic environment? [recent headlines](https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/musk-orders-all-twitter-staff-back-office-first-company-wide-email-exceptions-need-personal-approval/), including [at Prime Video’s own parent company](https://www.npr.org/2023/02/17/1158102101/amazon-office-remote-work). That’s the biggest of the many plot threads that remain unresolved in The Consultant. The show hints that Regus is not just weird, but possibly otherworldly: his name is phony, and his digital footprint nonexistent. When a visit from a group of middle schoolers ends in Woo’s death, the leadership vacuum is quickly filled by the surprise arrival of Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz). Though the office is outfitted with all the trappings of a thriving tech company—classic arcade games, cereal in the break room, an ostentatious glass walkway staffers call the “upskirt gallery”—Sang has not told anyone that the company only has months’ worth of capital left. The Consultant’s psychological accuracy extends past Regus to his new workplace. Undoubtedly, the casting of Christoph Waltz is the show’s biggest coup: “the weirdest man you can ever imagine meeting” is his default performance style these days. Nell Suarez of Not Dead Yet learns that pursuing a romantic relationship has not just stalled her career as a journalist, but rolled it back (and that’s at a newspaper that, we’re also given to understand, soon may go under). Betty Suarez of Ugly Betty rose through the ranks of magazine publishing. At Compware, a Los Angeles developer of mobile games, Elaine (Brittany O’Grady) is the executive assistant to the company’s founder and CEO, Sang Woo (Brian Yoon).

Few actors bring as much smiling menace to a role as Christoph Waltz, and he has a doozy of one to showcase those qualities in "The Consultant," a crackling ...

The only real drawback is that they set up so many possibilities early regarding Patoff that the finishing kick, including flashbacks puttying in some key details, proves a minor letdown considering the places to which the story might have gone. The challenge he tackles here is particularly formidable, coming off as strange and even dangerous without being so bizarre as to send the CompWare staff fleeing into the streets. Without missing a beat, a consultant arrives to take over, introducing himself as Regus Patoff (Waltz), who awkwardly greets the understandably confused troops by saying, “Good morning, comrades,” and only becomes weirder from there, including an obsession with smell that prompts him to sniff his employees. [“Inglourious Basterds,”](https://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/08/20/tarantino.movie.villain/index.html) although the closest kin to this might be the micro-series he starred in for Quibi, [“Most Dangerous Game,”](https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/06/entertainment/quibi-review/index.html) not that anybody would remember it. [“WandaVision”](https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/14/entertainment/wandavision-review/index.html)) establish a truly off-kilter tone, including the company’s ornate glass offices that resembles a giant hamster maze. [“Severance”](https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/17/entertainment/severance-review/index.html) school of “Boy, I’m glad I don’t work there.” Although the show doesn’t pay off quite as well as it starts, the getting-there is twisty enough to merit getting on board.

The Consultant is a stylish but disappointing new workplace thriller. The Christoph Waltz-led series is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

However, the series goes out of its way to build a mystery around Regus’ origins that not only proves to be lackluster, but also pushes The Consultant’s already thin sense of logic to its breaking point. From the moment he first arrives on the scene, it’s clear that Waltz’s odd corporate consultant is a person — or being — of callus efficiency. The closing moments of the show’s eighth episode not only leave many lingering questions either unanswered or unaddressed, but they also unconvincingly sweep some of its biggest plot holes and logic jumps under the rug. [WandaVision helmer Matt Shakman](https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/wandavision-review-marvel/), who directs the series’ premiere installment. The Consultant, as a result, ends up feeling like little more than a stylish, but hollow exercise in genre storytelling. Written and run by British TV veteran Tony Basgallop, The Consultant aims to be both a treatise on the dangers of undying corporate devotion and an acidic piece of pulpy genre entertainment. While it makes sense for Craig and Elaine to be initially accommodating toward Regus, their continued willingness to go along with even his most dastardly of plans strains whatever sense of realism Basgallop might have been trying to achieve. If Waltz’s casting as Regus is predictable, The Consultant makes it clear that there never really was another man for the job. Not only does Regus seem totally unbothered by the brutal murder of CompWare’s CEO, but he immediately inserts himself as the company’s new, de facto leader. From domineering bosses and unorthodox, unethical work schedules to an overwhelming, enforced fear of job loss, The Consultant is full of so many shocking HR violations that it might as well come with a trigger warning targeted at anyone who still has nightmares about the conditions of some of their past jobs (this writer included). With his strange quirks, obsessive interest in neatness, and ability to verbally manipulate anyone who comes into contact with him, Regus isn’t all that different from some of Waltz’s most iconic roles, including Inglourious Basterds‘ Hans Landa. That’s the case, at least, when it comes to Christoph Waltz’s performance as The Consultant’s eponymous corporate fixer, a mysterious man of unknown origin named Regus Patoff.

Actor Nat Wolff and his co-stars spoke to Newsweek about the new Prime Video show starring Christoph Waltz.

"The main thing I took from the book was the premise. Wolff continued, "I've gotten to work with a lot of great older actors and I think he took on the most paternal role of any of them that I've ever worked with. He can stare at you for a while, and I was sweating so much the first day and then I sweat throughout the whole production. Someone I want to keep writing for because I enjoy it so much," Basgallop told Newsweek. "As you sort of turn into an old dog, you learn to trust. It was exactly my sensibility as a viewer, so I thought I got to be a part of this." I would fall asleep to the same video of him talking to Charlie Rose. "There's something about the quality of his voice that puts me to sleep—not in real life—but I used to watch YouTube videos of him when I was 17. I know what an actor can do, I know what I can do. Episode 1, "Creator," sets up its premise and informs audiences what kind of show The Consultant is going to be with some shocking turn of events. "I've been a huge fan of his forever," he told Newsweek. Based on Bentley Little's book of the same name, The Consultant has been adapted for TV by Tony Basgallop.

Warning: Contains SPOILERS for The ConsultantAmazon's The Consultant borrows many narrative elements from its original Bentley Little novel but directs them ...

By doing so, The Consultant paints a well-rounded picture of how in its satirical corporate cynicism, the devil is not so black as he is painted. Instead of solely depicting the titular consultant as an antagonist and his employees as morally ambiguous anti-heroes, Instead of destroying CompWare, he redeems it towards the end of The Consultant and then goes on to target another organization. [Amazon Prime Video's The Consultant](https://screenrant.com/where-to-watch-the-consultant/) shrouds Regus Patoff's identity in mystery, it never presents him as an unimaginable evil force that does not have a face. However, as The Consultant progress, Patoff's character drifts further away from the book's version and consequently triggers significant changes in the show's ending. On the surface, Amazon's The Consultant is indistinguishable from its source material.

Christoph Waltz and series writer, Tony Basgallop, talk Prime Video's The Consultant, whether there will be a Season 2, and Waltz's character.

WALTZ: Well, I can't say that I enjoyed it, but I can't say that I was averse to it either, you know? I'm a big fan of your work, and I'm curious, when you are – hypothetically – filming a big scene on a Monday, something emotional or something that you know is going to take a little bit out of you, how early on are you preparing for something like that? You just don't smoke, that's how you stop smoking, and the same thing with characters, you just don't do it. What I didn't want to do is just, “Let's get to the end of every season and have a huge cliffhanger, and then we'll figure out what it is, how we can solve it later in the next season if we're lucky enough.” It very much wasn't that approach. I don't think I ever went in there and said, “This is Episode 1, this is Episode 2,” you know? Part of the intrigue and the allure is that you're being kept in the dark about the backstory. I've, over the years, 25 plus years of doing this, I kind of got a sense of when information needs to drop and when you need to hold things back. TONY BASGALLOP: That's the job of the writer, though, is, when you write the pilot, you throw these balls in the air, and then you know you're going to have to perform tricks and land them all successfully. Primarily, it's the fact that you go to people's living rooms, you go to visit people's homes with television, whereas in the movies you ask people to come to you. So what was it about this project that said, “I want to sign on and I want to play this role.”? Not that there's nothing worthwhile watching, but in this case, it is something that I thought, “It would be really, really intriguing to visit people in their houses with that story, playing that character.” So things came together from different sides. Uptight and unforgiving, Regus is a fire-at-will “Suit” who hardly has to look for a reason to let go of the staff.

Nat Wolff, who stars in Prime Video's 'The Consultant,' talks about finally coming into his own after years in the spotlight.

“I now consider it a badge of honor; it’s actually hard to have every person in the world have the same low opinion.” (It’s Behaving Badly, and the audience score is 29 percent.) And, of course, he knows people are going to read this profile; when he orders a cup of coffee (yes, with shrimp tacos), he notes that his typical aversion to coffee is legendary enough that if I write about it, he’ll “probably get calls from ex-girlfriends.” Eventually, the discourse will find you. “I did a movie with Selena Gomez when I was 16 that has a 0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes,” he says. He still viscerally remembers reading an interview of his after Behaving Badly, when the reporter describes an inadvertent choke as an attempt to get out of talking about the movie’s poor ratings. The science is out, this is so stupid.” He realized what he really craved was an excuse to take breaks; now he gets by with stepping outside, taking deep breaths, and turning his brain off. After an accidental name-drop of BFF Andrew Garfield prompts a question about his famous-friend group, he feigns morbid embarrassment and takes off for a bathroom reset not unlike the aforementioned choke. It’s meant to raise questions of power and autonomy, and Wolff learned to think about the ways the entertainment industry tests actors’ morality and ethics, and to fight off some of his people-pleasing nature. “I was doing this Tiger King show [for Peacock] that called for me to smoke fake cigarettes and wound up getting totally hooked on real ones,” he says. Now he’s preparing for the release of a series that features his first starring TV role — and a run alongside Parker Posey and Hari Nef in an off-Broadway adaptation of The Seagull/Woodstock, NY — and feeling further from those days than ever. “I was really insulated by fame as a kid, but I’ve reached a point where I just don’t care about that at all.” The first was in 2007, when his show The Naked Brothers Band (based on his real-life musical group) became Nickelodeon’s most popular kids’ series — that was the kind of fame that got him bullied at his New York City middle school. Then, in 2015, he led Paper Towns, the big-screen adaptation of John Green’s blockbuster YA novel — that was the screaming-teen-girls-following-you-on-a-global-press-tour variety.

Christoph Waltz plays a very, very bad boss in a dark tech-industry satire from Amazon Prime Video.

(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. His primary co-stars are Brittany O’Grady (“White Lotus”) and Nat Wolff (“The Stand”) as Elaine, an executive assistant, and Craig, a coder. Night Shyamalan](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/arts/television/m-night-shyamalan-servant.html?searchResultPosition=2) among its executive producers, [succeeded in its early going](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/28/arts/television/servant-review-m-night-shyamalan.html?searchResultPosition=1) largely on the basis of Lauren Ambrose’s antic, fearless performance as a frantic tiger mom. 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. (The young technocrat doesn’t appear to have a soul to give up.) The evil new boss, a silver-haired suit named Regus [(Christoph Waltz)](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/arts/television/christoph-waltz-the-consultant-amazon.html), 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 new Amazon Prime Video series starring Christoph Waltz premieres on February 24. We've compiled everything you need to know about the series, ...

Our favorite of the bunch is the [Kindle Paperwhite](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KTZ8249/?tag=decider08-20&asc_refurl=https://decider.com/2023/02/24/is-the-consultant-on-prime-video-based-on-a-book/&asc_source=web). [Kindle e-book version](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LXB1PUG/?tag=decider08-20&asc_refurl=https://decider.com/2023/02/24/is-the-consultant-on-prime-video-based-on-a-book/&asc_source=web) of The Consultant is $6. [Audible](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015CZKFVG/?tag=decider08-20&asc_refurl=https://decider.com/2023/02/24/is-the-consultant-on-prime-video-based-on-a-book/&asc_source=web) for $15 or one credit. Because so many things are these days, you might wonder if The Consultant is based on a book. You can also get The Consultant on [Libro.fm](https://go.skimresources.com?id=93051X1547101&xs=1&xcust=dec-CT--&url=https%3A%2F%2Flibro.fm%2Faudiobooks%2F9781504655514-the-consultant), which, like Bookshop, supports independent bookstores. [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1587676567/?tag=decider08-20&asc_refurl=https://decider.com/2023/02/24/is-the-consultant-on-prime-video-based-on-a-book/&asc_source=web) for $18 or from [Bookshop](https://howl.me/cjbcaz0MESh), an online store that lets you support an independent bookshop of your choice, for $19. [Prime Video](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/storefront?filterId=OFFER_FILTER%3DPRIME&tag=decider08-20&asc_refurl=https://decider.com/2023/02/24/is-the-consultant-on-prime-video-based-on-a-book/&asc_source=web) (which costs $14.99/month or $139/year as part of an Amazon Prime subscription). New Audible members get their first book for free. [Amazon Prime Video](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/storefront?filterId=OFFER_FILTER%3DPRIME&tag=decider08-20&asc_refurl=https://decider.com/2023/02/24/is-the-consultant-on-prime-video-based-on-a-book/&asc_source=web) is getting in on the “darkly comedic workplace thriller” trend with [The Consultant](http://decider.com/show/the-consultant), a new series premiering on March 24. [Servant](http://decider.com/show/servant) on [Apple TV+](https://go.skimresources.com?id=93051X1547101&xs=1&xcust=dec-CT--&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftv.apple.com%2F%3Fmttn3pid%3DGoogle%2520AdWords%26mttnagencyid%3Da5e%26mttncc%3DUS%26mttnsiteid%3D143238%26mttnsubad%3DOUS2019801_1-647562339240-c%26mttnsubkw%3D75222218304__l8rPaTYl_%26mttnsubplmnt%3D). [Stephen King has praised Little’s work](https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1218364088352497665). [Christoph Waltz](https://decider.com/tag/christoph-waltz/) as the titular consultant, who is brought into gaming company CompWare to improve business but ends up overstepping until he essentially runs the company.

If you like watching Christoph Waltz being weird, this show will have lots and lots of that.

While The Consultant isn’t that funny or scary, and many of the supporting characters are one-dimensional. Regus is that kind of role in spades, with the big mystery being just how he gets these CEOs to sign these consultancy agreements and why they seem to end up dead soon afterwards. It’s more strange than funny and a bit morbid in places — like when Elaine tries to clean the shade-pattern blood splatter on the window of Regus’ new office. It’s hard to say after the first episode, but it sure is fun to watch Waltz just doing what Waltz does best. So he takes Sang’s blood-splattered office and tells Elaine to tell the employees there is a meeting that morning. Or is this just going to be one sinister event after the other? And Waltz’s work here also recalls [Most Dangerous Game](https://decider.com/show/most-dangerous-game/), the short-lived Quibi thriller he made with Liam Hemsworth (which can also be streamed on Prime Video). Of course, Elaine and Craig want to know who this guy is. He says his name is Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz) and he’s a consultant hired by Sang-woo to make some changes. He is a bit strange; he smiles when he says sinister things, and he can’t seem to climb up stairs without a lot of help. They anticipate that the company will go out of business and everyone will lose their jobs. The Gist: The kids are taking a tour of CompWare, a maker of popular phone games.

It stars Oscar-winning actor Christoph Waltz in the role of Regus Patoff, a mysterious new boss of a video game development company called CompWare. It becomes ...

Even if Elaine and Craig survived and even thrived in the aftermath, their importance is secondary to machines in the future of American working life. As for Craig, he gets to know the truth about CompWare and Patoff through the aforementioned big golden toe. This is an ominous, but not completely unrealistic, result of the storytelling we see throughout the show. There was a sacrifice that had to be made by Elaine to become the boss. The elephant effectively promoted the video game to garner over 1 million downloads, and the office throws a party in celebration of the achievement. Patoff wants to collect a record of every person who downloads the newly released video game, something he does through Patti. Sang’s Jungle Odyssey.” We immediately see in the season finale that the animal caused catastrophic damage to certain parts of the city and then tragically passed away once it was captured. In an homage to the company’s game, Craig uses a hammer to shatter the glass floor both men walk upon, resulting in Patoff falling through the shards like the game characters. And what are the fates of the two employees we followed all season, Craig and Elaine (Nat Wolff and Brittany O’Grady)? What was the point of Regus’ takeover of CompWare? The things he asks of his employees pop up in his mind at random with no grasp of the consequences he’s inflicting on other humans. The show has many different mystery and thriller undertones that kept us interested in what was to come next, but the ending of the finale may be hard to understand if you weren’t paying full attention to specific plot points earlier in the season.