The third episode of WeCrashed, Apple TV+’s eight-part series about the steep rise and fall of WeWork founders Adam and Rebekah Neumann, gives viewers a little taste of the life of a startup employee. It’s 2012 and an unnamed employee arrives on her first day at work; She’s got a key card, an Apple laptop, a reminder that there’s a “Thank God It’s Monday” meeting at 7 p.m., and a mimosa. In one of the series’ most effective montages — largely because it diverts attention from the two eccentric, delusional founders who take up most of the screen time — we whirl through the hedonistic, busy life of the unnamed WeWork contributor. Coffee, shot, staff party, sex with a colleague in a pantry. Adam Neumann Leadership in a “We!” “Work!” call and answer. Another shot, another day, pass out, wake up, repeat. Is it night or is it noon? At your desk or at a party? It doesn’t matter – she’s at work, that’s life.
This ethos of so-called “Hustle Culture” – the idea that work is life and that one’s worth comes from constant work – runs through a series of shows set in the 2010s. It’s most evident in WeCrashed, based on the Wondery podcast of the same name, in which Neumann literally tells workers to “work harder” (also the title of episode five, which airs this Friday). The Theranos employees in The Dropout, Hulu’s eight-part series about Elizabeth Holmes’ fraudulent blood testing company that was once the darling of Silicon Valley, work all nights, missing kids’ birthday parties and dinners in the name of changing the world. Ditto for the Uber employees in Super Pumped, Showtime’s series about Uber’s relentless, now-disgraced founder Travis Kalanick, who berates employees for pursuing growth at any cost (and changing the world). is very upset that her notoriety as a ‘Soho grab’ overshadowed how hard she worked on the business plan that ultimately exposed her; The journalist who covers her is so obsessed with the story and what it means to her career that she works at the office.
These shows, all of which feature headlines from uniquely deceitful, messianic people, have been roughly classified in the Headline-to-TV pipeline as True-Con TV, Bad Entrepreneur TV, or Modern Grift series. These are all fair descriptions – all four series, which premiered within a month, showcase our never-ending fascination with the art of cheating (see also: recent Netflix docuseries hits The Tinder Swindler and Bad Vegan). But they also build up piece by piece the iconography of a particular piece of millennial experience that is now barely recognizable from the rear. There are the intentionally dated late 2000s/early 2010s nods – the music (Katy Perry gets a name drop in both WeCrashed and The Dropout), the fashion, the fascination with (and mourning for) Steve Jobs. And there’s an uncomfortable, immature line of “hustle culture” or “workism” — the distinctly American, quasi-religious belief system among the college-educated elite (myself included) that work is not just a job, it’s an identity, an arbiter of self-esteem and a thing worth believing in. WeWork is not a company, said Adam Neumann infamously, but a movement.
Hustle culture, like other ideologies, is amorphous. It underpinned the #girlboss, the rise of influencers, the complete elision between self and making a living online; There is no clear beginning or end, but if you look around you can see evidence of its decline. There’s been a recent backlash over Kim Kardashian’s advice to businesswomen to “get up your damn ass and work,” eulogies of the heady, doomed early days of venture capital-backed digital media, the so-called Great Resignation, and The Age of Anti -Ambition. These shows appeal to current prestige TV sensibilities — antiheroes, timeline jumping, expensive hair and makeup transformations on famous actors — but they distinctly feel like another era, a time of “rise and grind.” -Slogans. They could end up focusing on one uniquely intriguing, hideous person at a time and uncomfortably posit that the people who believed them weren’t ruffians, but to describe them as portraits of modern grift is an incomplete picture. Together they form a limited, loose, and imperfect mosaic of a belief system that transcends those constrained by Holmes, Kalanick, the Neumanns, or Delvey.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Super Pumped. Photo: ShowtimeThey are also part of a larger development of workism on television. Showtime’s Billions and HBO’s Industry, both financial industry shows that became modest hits in the late 2010s, are about watching (hot) people smash their personal lives and morals through the (lucrative) mill run a hyper-competitive company – tedious work. HBO’s Succession, one of television’s most acclaimed shows, is about a group of people who make absolutely no distinction between work, home life and family. In a lively New York profile on Succession star Jeremy Strong, British actor Brian Cox, who plays patriarch Logan Roy, said of Strong’s notoriously intense acting style: “I think it’s a quintessentially American disease, this inability to let go of yourself to separate does the job.” This is a good summary of Apple TV+’s recent sleeper hit “Severance,” in which characters undergo a brain procedure that literally separates their work and life. Severance, as Ringer’s Alison Herman argues, is the creepy newcomer to the genre of “spooky office” shows like Corporate, Better Off Ted, or Loki. Call it the mystery box, the antithesis of the Hustle Culture Show — rather than blurring the lines of an 18-hour day, Severance is an extreme allegory of work-life balance that also hints at something sinister at corporate headquarters.
That’s not to say that all hustle culture shows work as effective critiques or entertainment worth sinking into for 8-10 hours. Inventing Anna, as I wrote earlier, is both too gullible towards Anna and not interested enough in her. In a strange and unrewarded decision, modern workplace soap opera maestro Shonda Rhimes turned the con story into a newsroom drama starring a fictional journalist, Vivian Kent (loosely based on Jessica Pressler, the New York Magazine writer, who spoke about the definitive Anna Delvey feature reported in 2018) is obsessed with salvaging her career through Anna’s story. Created by Billions co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien, Super Pumped is Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) carnivorous corporate governance – growth at any cost – with gonzo flourishes (narration by Quentin Tarantino, Breaking the Fourth Wand), ultimately underscoring his complacency. The Dropout is by far the best of these shows, the only one that strikes that tricky balance between thrilling the scammers and annihilating their lies.
Naveen Andrews and Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout. Photo: Beth Dubber/APCreated by Drew Crevello and Lee Eisenberg (writer, producer and director of The Office), WeCrashed has a better grasp of the absurdity of the office environment than one might expect and is a convincingly toxic duo in Anne Hathaway’s Rebekah and Jared Leto’s Adam, but comparatively frivolous assignments. Through the inexorably rising tide of the conspiracy, Adam appears to be persuasive and successful; Rating numbers are being tossed around with too many zeros to feel consequential. ‘s Angie Han called the show “entertaining but ultimately irrelevant,” and I can’t think of a better way to describe it.
Part of the appeal and problem of Hustle Culture shows is that they depict a story too recent to see clearly yet too distant, especially since the pandemic has split the timeline for many viewers to see the feel the zeitgeist. Still, it’s somewhat unsettling to watch WeCrashed, a series that takes an idea to the extreme – the neon “Hustle Harder” signs and “Do What You Love” mugs are hustle culture at its most explicit – which is hardly out of date. (Full disclosure: In 2019, I worked as a member of Guardian US at a WeWork New York office.) The thank God It’s Monday parties and billion-dollar ratings are meant to seem ridiculous on this 2022 show, and they always have been. The random results of these hustle culture shows reflect a culture that is just beginning to understand this.