The Consultant: Full Season

March 7, 2023 4:27 PM - Season 1 (Full Season)

When a new consultant, Regus Patoff, is hired to improve the business of the app-based gaming company CompWare, employees experience new demands and challenges that put everything into question, including their lives.
posted by dianeF (14 comments total)

Can someone help me understand this show? In making this post, I found out it’s a ‘dark comedy.’ The comedy part must be going over my head. And I really, really don’t understand the story that jeweler in Pomona told Craig (involving doctors and a skeleton?).
posted by dianeF at 4:31 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I don't get how it had any real comedic elements - I mean, it was good, dark and kooky/weird - which I like, but dark comedy? Not really. Some satirical elements yes.
posted by rozcakj at 6:05 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

There were comedic elements were how he warped (um, incentivized) the employees to work like madmen to the company's advantage. It's definitely not a drama, or anything lighter, so I wonder if it falls into "dark horror-comedy" from lack of other descriptors. It's an odd show. It doesn't really come together at the end, but it's very watchable -- short episodes, and fun to watch Christopher Waltz be a total freak. Like a lot of shows and movies since Hannibal, it felt very Hannibal inspired.
posted by grandiloquiet at 6:07 PM on March 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh 'dianeF'... the skeleton... how much does a gold skeleton weigh? perhaps alot, so much that someone might be a little wary around glass stairs and walkways... I think it was also a not-so-veiled reference to "Mammon".
posted by rozcakj at 6:08 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is definitely a comedy in the modern sense. Comedy used to mean that a story had a happy ending. Then it meant that the story was funny or amusing. Now the it means that a show has 30 minute episodes.
posted by Garm at 9:00 PM on March 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

I somehow understood what was happening and enjoyed this show but had no idea what I had just watched. It is truly bizarre, in a good way.
posted by wierdo at 12:40 AM on March 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I also have no idea what I just watched, but overall I had a good time. It became clear when the golden skeleton was introduced that this show fits into a particular kind of surrealist / fantasy subgenre, and I am bemused by the sheer number of viewers in the Reddit sub who are ALL CAPS angry that it's "unrealistic".
posted by confluency at 4:53 AM on March 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

So is he supernatural? Did he hypnotize that woman Patty? Who built him out of gold?
posted by dianeF at 6:31 AM on March 10, 2023

It was a fun, as usual, to watch Waltz play a sinister weirdo. Pretty much all of the specifics of the plot were silly and unrealistic even within the supernatural conceits I'm happy to accept.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 7:22 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

So is he supernatural?

Pretty sure he is supposed to be the devil - or a high-level demon. They drop a few supernatural hints - his magnetism, they way the servers change color from blue to red as he walks by in the sub-basement, he holds people in hypnotic thrall, his life and death contracts, the private club, etc. And probably only a devil or demon could withstand the many, many surgeries it would have taken to replace all the bones. (And - it was many many surgeons over years from what I recall of the storyline) They even drop some musical hints at times.

(And when it comes to the bones, remember - he sliced his toe off when he fell, and one of the characters took it home to uncover the 'bone' beneath the flesh, and it was... gold)
posted by rozcakj at 12:57 PM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thank you, rozcakj. I somehow got in in my head that he was a patented invention or something. Your explanation makes a lot mor sense.
posted by dianeF at 1:39 PM on March 10, 2023

I think it's implied that he's a demon (if not The Devil) and that a corporeal body was constructed for him in some kind of elaborate ritual. Why a gold skeleton? I don't know, and I think that a more detailed explanation of the lore would kind of ruin the vaguely ominous vibe.
posted by confluency at 11:18 PM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

My early speculation was the the contract was a literal deal with the devil. Certainly there was nothing in the show that dissuaded me from that idea.
posted by wierdo at 11:21 PM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

It was a fun watch - clearly we were meant to root for Christopher Waltz.
posted by vitabellosi at 1:58 PM on March 28, 2023