We’re still deep in the puzzlebox era, I’m sad to report. You know what I mean: eight- to 10-episode TV arcs that revolve round a mystery, revealing the prestige of it via incremental steps and breadcrumbed clues, ideally with a couple of flashback scenes that seed more context as the story unfurls.
This has been going on for ages – True Detective or Lost or that first, good series of Westworld. You could argue conceptual comedy such as The Good Place or Russian Doll contribute to the genre; I mean, you could argue that every sleepy murdery-mystery show since the 90s has been one, too. Was Line of Duty all a puzzlebox? People were making wallcharts about it, so I’m going to say yes. I’d even count The White Lotus as, if not full puzzlebox, then at least puzzlebox-adjacent – a body washes up on the shore, a cast of characters are introduced, you watch the whole thing with a dreadful anticipation as to who, out of everyone, might die. We love puzzles, don’t we? I mean look how mad we all went for Wordle!
But what happens when the puzzle isn’t good enough? What if the central core of the puzzle is built on uneven ground, or the tendril-like clues are pulled to the surface by unskilled hands? Then it isn’t actually a puzzle any more. It’s just things happening, a lot. Anyway, Prime Video has a new series out called The Consultant (from 24 February).
We’ll start with the good bit, which is: Christoph Waltz is in it. If you want someone to do sinisterly charismatic, then Waltz is the best in the business, and here he’s doing a completely fine version of what he did so deliciously with Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds: lots of neat domestic actions done with extreme care, lots of surprising people by speaking a difficult language, a lot of efficacious politeness and tone-changing grins. He’s the eerie new consultant at an LA-based mobile game developer, CompWare, and as he straightens his tie and creaks up the stairs at the very centre of the office to announce his new regime, the two sexiest employees in the company are forced to ask: just what is going on?
This is a big-budget TV show set at a glossy-but-secretly-failing media organisation with a new but extremely strange boss, so it is going to attract – in fact, feels almost lab-designed to attract – Elon Musk analogies. I’ll just get ahead of those with a very simple “no”, to save you the discourse. The Consultant also feels as if it’s trying very hard to be interpreted as a jugular-slicing critique of workplace power imbalances while bottling the post-Covid fear that is now associated with offices, but fundamentally just isn’t good or interesting enough to hit any of those pulse points.
The central characters keep shifting underfoot, which doesn’t help. Brittany O’Grady’s Elaine can’t decide if she’s scared for her life, a Nancy Drew-like detective or a brazen careerist; Nat Wolff’s Craig zags between kiss-ass, doubter, stoner-slacker and genius. Even Waltz’s Patoff slips around a little: sometimes he is supernaturally terrifying, sometimes he’s just doing some accounting. It’s hard to care what any of them are thinking, doing, motivated by or scared of, when the fundamental blocks of their characters shift from episode to episode, from scene to scene.
I recently finished Severance – yes I’m a TV critic who only just watched one of the outstanding shows of last year – which did everything The Consultant tries to do but far, far better: thriller-level fear of the workplace; a sinister, expanding something-is-going-on feeling; two employees who really need to just kiss each other, now, come on; and never quite knowing if the cause of all the weirdness is supernatural, sci-fi, or Other. The Severance finale was divisive – it answered about three of the questions posed by the series as a whole, then asked 10 more and then ended – but you always felt you knew that it was going somewhere. The Consultant, despite Waltz’s immaculate lapel-straightening, never quite fills you with that confidence.
Our hunger for neat little puzzles is about to wane, is my prediction. There are only so many Easter eggs you can pore over that turn out to be absolutely nothing – I’m looking at the head statues from season two of The White Lotus right now and pulling a really smug face! No they didn’t mean anything! Stop filling in the gaps for a lazy creator! Audiences will only tolerate so many series that promise itch-scratching intricacy and deliver “yeah … OK” instead. Hopefully, with a good wind, The Consultant should be the last of them we have to sit through for a while.
