About halfway through the eight episodes of WeCrashed on Apple TV+, an investor named Cameron (OT Fagbenle) shares with his Benchmark Capital colleague Bruce (Anthony Edwards) his skepticism about WeWork’s high-spend business model. “We’ve seen this movie before, haven’t we?” Cameron notes. So what has changed this time?
Bruce is firm in his response, insisting that it is Adam (Jared Leto), the company’s astonishingly ambitious and unique co-founder, who matters. But Cameron’s words will prove more prophetic. We’ve seen this story before, detailed in actual news stories about Neumann or mirrored in other recent mini-series about corporate scams and scams. WeCrashed does an interesting enough reconstruction, reveling in the absurdity of Neumann’s worst impulses, but has little to add to the beats we already know by heart.
WeCrashed
Outcome Amusing, but ultimately irrelevant.
Location: SXSW Film Festival (episodic premieres)
Air date: Friday, March 18 (Apple TV+)
Throw: Jared Leto, Anne Hathaway, Kyle Marvin
Creators: Drew Crevello and Lee Eisenberg
Created by Drew Crevello and Lee Eisenberg, with episodes directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (“Madness, Stupidity”, “Love”), Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (“American Splendor”, “Things Heard and Seen”) and more , WeCrashed follows the familiar rise and fall. A formula that traces Neiman’s path from an unsuccessful “serial entrepreneur” selling children’s clothing and folding high-heeled shoes to the world-famous CEO of a company theoretically valued at $47 billion, to his meteoric fall into notoriety after a failed the IPO filing exposed WeWork’s worst excesses. culture and Adam himself.
Somewhat unusually, it is also a love story. At every step, Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) stands aside, either greedily enhancing its brilliance, or standing resentfully in its shadow.
Adam is a gifted talker in his own right, endowed with bulletproof confidence, endless tenacity, and the ability to convince everyone else to do the real hard work. “Every great business story lasts all night,” he gleefully declares to co-founder Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin) at the start of their partnership, before heading home to bed and leaving Miguel to write a 17-page presentation overnight. Leto’s relentless energy makes it clear how Adam could wear down even those who thought they were smart enough to know better, while his dark contact lenses have the creepy (and possibly unintended) effect of making Adam look soulless.
But as WeCrashed puts it, Adam and Rebecca’s relationship is the foundation upon which both the best and worst – mostly worst – aspects of WeWork are built. It is Rebecca who first encourages Adam to follow his passion for chasing the world, which restores his self-esteem to full health when he experiences a rare moment of insecurity that convinces him that it is time for WeWork to expand into private teaching with WeGrow. .
Hathaway resists the temptation to turn Rebecca into an exaggerated “woo-hoo” caricature, which ends up making Rebecca funnier: the only thing more ridiculous than Rebecca’s “I’m the soul of the party” line is that Rebecca moves herself. almost to tears from her own depth when she says this.
Adam and Rebecca tend to indulge each other’s most ridiculous impulses, and as WeWork grows in value and reputation, the yes-and-each other pair into a permanent galactic brain state. Sober-minded outsiders may point out that their business is in trouble, but it doesn’t matter to them: “WeWork is not a business, it’s a feeling,” they insist.
WeCrashed reproduces the couple’s goofiness quite directly without winking or prodding, leaving us in the audience to blink or howl or shake our heads in disbelief as, for example, they talk themselves into throwing out the mandatory S-1 paperwork prepared by their lawyers and replacing it with something what Cameron caustically calls a “children’s book”. As obnoxious as Rebecca and Adam may seem, it’s easy to see what drew them to each other. In their own way, they are the perfect couple.
Based on the Wondery podcast, WeCrashed has been much less successful in demonstrating what attracted everyone else to the company or what kept them when more and more red flags began to appear. For example: That Adam has an iconic command over his workforce is clear from the scenes in which he leads the chant at the weekly drunken gatherings of “Thank God it’s Monday.” But why these employees are so dedicated to a company they bluntly describe as “a really bad place to work, especially if you’re a woman” is largely unexplored, aside from some vague nods to the glittery, toxic bustle culture of the early years. until the mid-2010s, which WeWork (and Adam) exemplifies so beautifully.
It is also unclear for much of the series how Adam was able to swindle allegedly experienced businessmen like Bruce. For that matter, it’s not even clear on most shows what he gets away with, as WeCrashed doesn’t bother to explain the most horrifying details of Adam’s shady business practices, such as his habit of buying buildings to rent out. his own company until very late in the evening.
And, like so many headline dramas, WeCrashed struggles to do something more important after all the time spent on recent story details. On the wreckage of WeWork’s failed IPO, Cameron scolds the company’s young employees for misleading themselves into buying Adam’s lofty nonsense about “raising the world’s consciousness” by renting desktops – which seems more than rich when Cameron’s fellow venture capitalists help inflate WeWork’s reputation to such dangerous proportions.
There just might not be much else to say, at least not from the whimsically romantic version of the story that WeCrashed tells. The real Adam Neumann and WeWork saga ended unsatisfactorily in 2019 when Adam (ah, real life spoilers?) lost his company but still walked away with more money than most of us will see in our lives. Even fiction can go so far as to correct such a confusing reality.