Originally published at: Anazon's new series The Consultant has a lot going for it | Boing Boing
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I saw a banner for this on Amazon, but had absolutely no idea what it was about - they weren’t giving anything away. Now that I’ve watched the trailer, I can’t get over the absurdity of the premise - this besuited corporate consultant would be wildly out of place in a small game studio like the one being depicted. There just wouldn’t be enough employees, for one, for this kind of reorganization to make sense, much less for someone like that to do it. Outside corporate consultants don’t know the business, and cost more than you’d save in layoffs. It might make sense for a tech company, but gaming isn’t tech and employees don’t make remotely that much money. (Having lived though the experience, what you get is some guy in a t-shirt from whatever parent game company owns the studio showing up and awkwardly trying to reorganize before the studio gets shut down or merged with another.)
I’m not sure if this is a deliberate (extreme) surreality we as the audience are supposed to recognize as such (making subsequent events of the show more nightmarish), or the makers of the show just really don’t understand the game industry (like every other tv show/movie).
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I watched the first season and enjoyed it.
I have no idea what a video-game office should look like, which most likely puts me in the majority.
It’s good fun, plus Christoph Waltz, for goodness’ sake.
(and just to be properly pedantic - wouldn’t it be 316th?)
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Now that I’ve watched the trailer, I can’t get over the absurdity of the premise - this besuited corporate consultant would be wildly out of place in a small game studio like the one being depicted.
Spoilers: That’s not the most unrealistic thing.
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I assume, just based on the trailer, that things become somewhat disconnected from reality, I’m just wondering if his initial presence at the studio is supposed to be as strange as it actually is. If we’re supposed to think, from the start, “Well, this is fucking weird” to set the stage for what happens subsequently, or we’re just supposed to (more or less) accept it and then things get completely surreal.
I have this problem with a lot of television where extreme liberties are taken with reality - I get confused as to where I’m expected to draw the boundaries of the fictional reality and expend too much mental energy trying to figure out what elements are supposed to be violating those boundaries.
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Amazon describes it as a comedy. Is it?
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Doh, yeah, Amazon, not Netflix.
It’s described as a comedy. Very dark comedy, but I did LOL once.
After Christoph’s “hostile” takeover, coders/worker ask aloud “who does he think he is, just waltzing in here.” Well, exactly.
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The name Regus Patoff aka Registered US Patent Office is the best thing of the show. It’s watchable, but you definitely gotta suspend disbelief. A bunch.
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I am about 1/2 way through it right now. It dark, disturbing, occasionally amusing, and very, very silly. Worth watching so far
(He’s the debbil, right?)
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I hope not. That would be kind of a letdown. I am hoping that he will turn out to be something more like Killer BOB from Twin Peaks.
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As an archaeologist I have never seen my profession portrayed realistically on screen. You learn to live with it. I think it is only strange for you because until recently the video game industry maybe wasn’t considered important enough to tell stories about, so you haven’t had the realisation that no job ever is shown even close to what it is like in real life.
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Having now finished it…I could not tell you what it is about…other than Waltz’s ability to hold our attentíon on-screen.
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Yeah, that’s like an ancient gag from the cartoons. I remember hearing this when I was a kid and laughing at the name.
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Yeah, and that’s the thing, all the traditional completely wrong ways that Hollywood portrays fields like archaeology, where they’re clearly disconnected from reality (and knowing that, with just some basic knowledge of the field), or counter-factual events e.g. every time someone gets shot in a show/movie and they’re dying but they remove the bullet and suddenly they’re stable - they’re such standardized bits of nonsense that even though they annoy the fuck out of me, I recognize that they’re supposed to be part of that fiction’s reality, I accept that’s the way things work in that world. I know, though exposure, how TV medicine and TV law enforcement work, even as I recognize that’s not remotely how they work in reality.
To put it in another context - imagine this obviously well-paid consultant showing up at, say, a fast food restaurant and deciding which minimum wage employees to fire. We would all recognize that it’s absurd, and that would inform our view of what happened next in the story. With this, I’m just not sure what we’re meant to understand, whether the show itself recognizes the absurdity of the situation.
Yes, that should be your reaction. It’s also all the employee’s reaction.
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No…it’s more like an edgelord version of… Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened” and…I dunno what. At the end I did not know what they were trying to say other than either a very weird “everything worked out okay in the end” (it did not), or “something something people are corruptable”.. Not so much Lost-like as not sure what the moral of the story was
That said it was entertaining to watch. Christopher Waltz is very talented
ETA: “Anazon” we’re getting closer… Did I write the headline? It feels like maybe I wrote the headline
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