Fans of dystopian workplace dramas along the lines of Severance — the Apple TV Plus release that quickly became one of the buzziest streaming hits of 2022 — are about to get a new 8-episode title along these same lines, this time from Amazon’s Prime Video service. It’s The Consultant, set within the office of an app-based gaming company, and starring a super-menacing Christoph Waltz as the ultimate boss from hell.
The Consultant on Prime Video
The series will debut in its entirety on February 24, and it’s based on Bentley Little’s 2016 novel of the same name. Waltz portrays the titular consultant Regus Patoff, while the rest of the cast includes Nat Wolff, Brittany O’Grady, and Aimee Carrero.
From Prime Video’s official synopsis of the new series:
“When a new consultant, Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz), is hired to improve the business at the App-based gaming company CompWare, employees experience new demands and challenges that put everything into question … including their lives.”
The series is from MGM Television and Amazon Studios. Its creator, showrunner, and executive producer Tony Basgallop is joined by executive producer and pilot director Matt Shakman. The executive producers include Waltz, Steve Stark, and Andrew Mittman, alongside producer Kai Dolbashian.
In Little’s novel, Mr. Patoff is the oddball consultant who shows up wearing a bow tie and a weird smile. Over time, the pleasantly odd consultant comes to be seen as something far eerier. He gains power, so much so that it feels like he’s ultimately running the company. He installs cameras, surveils employees, and even shows up at their houses. And it gets worse from there — life-threateningly worse.
What else to watch on Prime Video
While waiting for Amazon to debut The Consultant, meanwhile, there’s a lot more to check out in the meantime on the service following the jam-packed year of content it gave us in 2022.
For fans of spy series, for example, Jack Ryan Season 3 just recently hit the streamer. Some of its other hits over the past year included Reacher and The Terminal List. Many of Prime Video’s biggest successes of the recent past, in fact, were surprises, like the thriller The Devil’s Hour, while the streamer also took big swings with smaller-scale and critically well-received dramas like Night Sky and Paper Girls.
No question, though, the title that far and away dominated the year for Amazon’s Netflix rival was its long-awaited Lord of the Rings prequel series. Say what you will about it — reviews ranged from somewhat positive to fans feeling a bit disappointed — but it ensured that more people than ever were talking about and watching the service, something that hasn’t always been the case.
Can Amazon’s upcoming releases like The Consultant keep up the pattern from last year, by increasingly putting themselves at the forefront of the pop culture conversation? We shall see.
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