Think your boss is horrible? Meet Christoph Waltz's macabre 'Consultant,' Regus Patoff

So you think you’ve got a horrible boss?

Wait until you meet Regus Patoff, the hair-raising focal point of Amazon Prime Video's “The Consultant,”  (all episodes streaming Friday), an eight-part black comedy/horror series that lands just as CEOs are cracking down on post-pandemic office rules.

The enigmatic titan strolls into the glitzy headquarters of a video game company to take over for its founder and quickly wreaks havoc on employee rules and psyches. “There’s a little Regus Patoff in every boss I have had,” says series creator Tony Basgallop, who also guided the Apple TV+ horror series "Servant."

Creepily embodied by Christoph Waltz, Patoff seems the ne plus ultra of hard-line commandants. (Paging Elon Musk?) Or is Patoff perhaps just a disciplined and effective captain looking to right the ship at a technology company overrun with poor fiscal results, absent employees, and an in-house culture more focused on play than work?

What is a consultant?

When humans need help with our bodies, we call doctors. When executives need help with their companies, they call consultants.

Management consulting firms such as McKinsey and Bain & Co. send any number of MBA-packing employees to pore over business plans and financial results to come up with suggestions for getting companies back on track.

Sometimes consultants have deep industry expertise, but often they are generalists who aim to learn everything they can about a given business before applying applicable advice. Some welcome the counsel, others may see them as interlopers.

What is 'The Consultant'?

“The Consultant” series is based on a 2015 horror novel by Bentley Little, who was dubbed horror’s “poet laureate” by none other than horror maestro Stephen King.

In the book, Patoff dives into the financial inner workings of CompWare, a technology company where employees soon are dying mysteriously, being framed for crimes and being recorded surreptitiously. In the series, the twists are more realistic. For Basgallop, whose Apple TV+ horror series “Servant” confined its characters to a house, it was a chance to explore a larger situational canvas at a time of transition in the workplace.

“After the pandemic, it was clear things would change,” he says. “At many workplaces, the toys were taken away, and the good times were gone. Regus Patoff strips everything back, taking it to an old way of working between boss and employee.”

Who is Regus Patoff?

“Who I think he is is not only irrelevant but might be utterly incorrect,” says Waltz, who won best supporting actor Oscars for "Inglourious Basterds" and "Django Unchained." “It’s what you say about him, after you watch this, that matters. When you see a painting, you project on it your own reality. Same with Patoff.”

Waltz’s portrayal sometimes gives the impression Patoff is the devil incarnate. But in some scenes, as when he questions why someone with simple allergies has been allowed to stay away from the office for weeks, he seems like someone asking entirely reasonable workplace questions.

“When you talk to employers these days, many say that in interviews with young people, applicants are the ones stipulating the conditions under which they will work,” he says. “But it’s a job offering, no? Not an invitation for a leisurely weekend.”

How have millennials affected the workplace?

Actress Brittany O’Grady, 26, plays Patoff’s skeptical yet loyal assistant. She says she channeled past jobs to pull off that balancing act. “I drew from being stuck in jobs where I needed to survive but didn’t want to lose my moral compass,  either,” she says.

O’Grady, who was memorable as troublesome coed Paula in the first season of HBO's "The White Lotus," says the depiction of the gaming company in “The Consultant," with its young staffers “sipping Philz coffee and kombucha, is an extreme version of work environments today, where young employees do ask themselves how much they’re willing to sacrifice for their jobs, especially if the place feels toxic.”

The notion that millennials aren’t interested in working hard is inaccurate, she says. Rather, they want to ensure their lives “have balance. The pandemic made us realize we can work, but we don’t have to wear a suit, your dog can be barking, your kid can be sick. You can have a life outside this capitalistic system.”

Will work-from-office mandates be making a comeback?

As employers renegotiate the cultural compact with employees, it remains to be seen how much of today’s work-from-home, Zoom-based norms will remain. Basgallop says simply, “I know this may sound horribly right-wing, but my impression is that (pandemic-rules employment behavior) can’t sustain itself.”

In his early years, Waltz says of work-life balance, “I didn’t even know what that was, but now there’s definitely an emphasis on that very thing.” Still, he says that there needs to be an open dialog between employer and employee. “Sometimes, criticism or corrective hints are taken as an attack, so how are you to communicate?”

For O’Grady, the past is prologue. She watched documentaries during the pandemic about global crises that inevitably resulted in “more wellness and more humane standards for people. So that is hopefully what we’ll be seeing here as well.”

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'The Consultant': Christoph Waltz plays a horrible boss in Amazon show