There was a time when at least some TV shows about work revolved around people who’d landed their dream jobs. Betty Suarez of Ugly Betty rose through the ranks of magazine publishing. Lorelai Gilmore of Gilmore Girls—who once cleaned hotel rooms as a single teen mom—capped her career by opening her own inn. The staffers of The West Wing never complained of burnout, even when one of them got shot. 

Now, as far as TV is concerned, work is a nightmare that characters struggle to survive. Rachel Fleishman of Fleishman Is In Trouble achieves every professional goal she’s ever pursued, and gets rewarded with a nervous breakdown. 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). The quasi-lobotomized refiners of Severance try to escape their office-bound existence by battling, essentially, themselves. The new Prime Video series The Consultant joins this contemporary mode with a provocative premise: what if your new “boss from hell” maybe literally was?

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). 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). He has a contract to consult “on all matters of business,” despite the fact that, as becomes clear over the next weeks, he knows absolutely nothing about what Compware does. Creator Tony Basgallop (also a creator on the AppleTV+ series Servant) adapted Bentley Little’s 2015 novel for the series, writing every episode; the pilot is directed by Matt Shakman, of WandaVision fame.

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. (In 2020, he appeared as human-hunter Miles Sellers in a new take on The Most Dangerous Game—for Quibi, so it was essentially a movie cut into 15 quick bites—and there’s very little daylight between that character and this one.) At first, the changes Regus imposes at Compware are unpleasant, but not wildly outside the norm. His demand that all remote workers return to the office immediately, for example, is straight out of recent headlines, including at Prime Video’s own parent company. He also subjects employees to an invasive smell test to try to identify the source of an unpleasant odor, evoking a much more offensive real-life CEO. Regus’s practice of controlling employees by alternating praise and abuse will be familiar, and possibly triggering, to anyone who’s ever worked for a narcissist.

The Consultant’s psychological accuracy extends past Regus to his new workplace. 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. Elaine, the assistant who’s learned all his idiosyncrasies, lives miles away with multiple roommates because it’s the best she can afford. Craig (Nat Wolff), her best work friend, works in what seems like a dream design job, but he’s so miserable that he’s had to promise his fiancée Patti (Aimee Carrero) to stop self-medicating with weed and fake sick days. 

It’s a realistically grim picture—which may be why, like Severance, The Consultant tempers its biting observations with genre trappings. The show hints that Regus is not just weird, but possibly otherworldly: his name is phony, and his digital footprint nonexistent. He seems to have conjured an entire records room in the Compware basement that no one ever saw before his arrival. When he walks past servers, their lights flicker red. The glass walkway we’re told could hold an elephant seems to groan when Regus stands on it.

But—and I guess this is a spoiler for something that doesn’t happen—we never do find out exactly what Regus’s origin or nature is. That’s the biggest of the many plot threads that remain unresolved in The Consultant. Not to keep banging this drum, 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? You probably get enough of that at work.