The Consultant received generally positive reviews from critics. On
Rotten Tomatoes, the series has a rating of 80% based on 44 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "With Christoph Waltz's menacing charm on retainer,
The Consultant compensates for its lack of depth with slick presentation and diverting twists." On
Metacritic, it has a score of 65 out of 100, indicating "generally favorable reviews". John Anderson of
The Wall Street Journal praised Waltz's performance, calling it "a mixed blessing in what is essentially a mystery in slow motion that keeps tilting toward comedy." However, he criticized the series' plotting and pace, stating that it "strings us along with unresolved questions, presuming we’ll stay fascinated, in a way that’s become irritatingly common among eight-part series." Daniel Fienberg of
The Hollywood Reporter criticized the series as feeling "perplexingly rushed at times and oppressively elongated at others", noting the lack of stylistic cohesion between the episodes, and feeling that the series overall was "neither terrifying nor trenchant." Fienberg wrote that Waltz gave "a compulsively watchable performance that falls right into the Oscar winner’s comfort zone of seductive weirdness", but felt it too reminiscent of the actor's previous roles. Annie Burke of
The A.V. Club unfavorably compared the series to
Apple TV+'s
Severance, feeling that it "lacks the concentrated, speculative concept" of that series. However, she praised the production design, calling the series' fictional workplace "a character, a narrative device, and a motif all rolled into one." She too described Waltz's performance as derivative of his former roles, writing that
The Consultant "amounts to Waltz reprising his role from
Horrible Bosses 2 with a steely, vaguely supernatural twist." Nick Allen of
RogerEbert.com criticized the series' writing for "piling on mysteries for the sake of getting stranger and stranger, without building a significant amount of tension." Kristen Baldwin of
Entertainment Weekly was more positive, calling the series' story "marvelously weird and darkly funny." She praised the performances of the central cast, noting Waltz's "quiet menace", O'Grady's "wary longing", and Wolff's "winning vulnerability". ==References==