WeCrashed on Apple TV Plus has yet to be clearly seen from the Hulu movies The Dropout and Showtime Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber. It’s a crude reminder of Hollywood’s current obsession with turning relatively recent news cycles on disgraced tech founders into glamorous prestige dramas. . WeCrashed has enough in common with its counterparts that you can easily recognize the nascent formula that the industry seems to have latched on to with these adaptations. But the new show manages to bring something a little different with a set of performances that are as unforgiving as they are exciting considering who WeCrashed is about and who portrays them.
Based on the Wondery podcast of the same name, WeCrashed by co-creators Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello tells the story of how Adam Neumann (Jared Leto) went from selling inappropriate children’s clothing to creating one of the world’s largest co-working companies and ultimately being ousted from the organization in just a few years. The real Neumann is a fairly self-aggrandizing character, so it’s easy to imagine versions of this series dedicated exclusively to him. But WeCrashed knows how important the stories of Neumann’s wife Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) and his co-founder Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin) are to understanding WeWork’s origins, its culture, and how the real estate startup managed to convince everyone to see it. as a technology company worth investing millions of dollars in.
Because there are always people who may not have necessarily followed the news at the time, WeCrashed chronicles WeWork’s history, jumping back and forth between important moments in the company’s history, starting in 2019, the year WeWork’s board of directors decided to remove Neumann from office. general director. WeCrashed introduces Neuman for the first time at a time when his reputation as a persuasive speaker and die-hard entrepreneur has been severely damaged by widespread reports of things like WeWork’s reckless spending, a sexist workplace culture, and a growing pile of lawsuits. Even though Neumann was very close to success by 2019, WeCrashed shows how confident he was still in leading WeWork to a successful IPO because that kind of unwavering belief in himself seems to have been his guiding principles as a founder. .
Most of Neiman’s classmates at Baruch College can’t help laughing at that certainty when they listen to his presentation many years ago in one of WeCrashed’s many flashbacks. But that’s what draws McKelvey into his orbit and convinces him to take on yet another co-working space that will be the precursor to WeWork. While WeCrashed usually presents its story in a way that is informative for those coming into the WeWork saga fresh, Eisenberg and Crevello’s scripts emphasize Neumann’s interactions with those closest to him to create the idea that his success in business was the result of his willingness to use people to his advantage.
A montage of WeCrashed detailing McKelvey’s hectic late-night single-handed streak that led to the creation of Greendesk seems very much a part of the founders’ current set of shows. Here, however, the consistency also serves as one of many examples of Neumann’s willingness to take credit for the work of others and how those around Neumann often felt unable to speak for themselves.
Compared to Marvin’s McKelvey, who often feels comfortable playing second fiddle to Leto’s cartoonish but inaccurate game with Neumann, Hathaway as Rebecca Neumann (née Paltrow, of those Paltrows) emerges as a knowing presence who may soon get to know her. the insatiable lust for the future husband’s business is like the red flag that she really is. Rebecca has some idea of the emotional void that exists inside Adam because that’s something she herself has experienced, and WeCrashed portrays them as a couple bonded by a shared attraction and a noticeable undercurrent of insanity that transforms over time.
WeCrashed doesn’t use a lot of gimmicks to distract you from the fact that structurally it’s not all that different from other founder shows. This is both because there are very few viable inventions of the wheel when it comes to adapting real-world events into entertainment, and because the stories of many unicorn companies share certain details, such as the founders promising too much to get. money from investors.
What WeCrashed does to that – and the show deftly leans on standing out – is the fact that two of the real people its main characters are based on are known for being rather eccentric ways in which both Hathaway and Leto are more than limited. have fun with.
As tempting as it is to interpret WeCrashed’s Neiman as Jared Leto, just Jared Leto in the name of art, his performance is truly impressive when compared to any of Neuman’s many clips that can be found online. The same can be said for Hathaway’s Rebecca, who goes through many unfulfilling and unsuccessful lives as a stock trader, yoga instructor and actress, all the while living in the shadow of her much more successful cousin. While Hathaway’s vocal imitation and demeanor as Neumann is immediately noticeable, what ultimately makes her performance one of WeCrashed’s bright spots is how its weirdness speaks to an emotional turmoil that Rebecca herself can’t quite articulate.
WeCrashed is not a comedy, but there is something comedic about the series, even in some of its most serious moments due to how many people involved in the history of WeWork acted completely ridiculous. Throughout the show, the truth about what WeWork — the company that rents out office space — is repeatedly pierced by the thick, opaque bubble of distorted reality that Neiman is developing, and makes one wonder why these people were entrusted with so much money to run a fundamentally uninnovative business. WeCrashed doesn’t go so far as to make fun of the coworking industry, but rather the show wants you to think about how these companies come about and what kind of people can run them.
WeCrashed also stars America Ferrera, Stephen Boyer, O. T. Fagbenle, Shanti Ashanti, Yui Sung Kim, and Cricket Brown. The first three episodes of the show are already streaming on Apple TV Plus.