If it wasn’t already abundantly apparent from Hulu’s The Dropout and Showtime’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Apple TV Plus’ WeCrashed is an unsubtle reminder of Hollywood’s current obsession with turning relatively recent news cycles focused on disgraced tech founders into glitzy prestige dramas. WeCrashed has enough in common with its peers that you can easily recognize a nascent formula the industry seems to be latching onto with these adaptations. But the new show manages to bring something slightly different to the table with a set of performances that are as unforgiving as they are fascinating to watch, given who WeCrashed is about and who’s portraying them.WeCrashed Season 1 Download
Based on the Wondery podcast of the same name, WeCrashed from co-creators Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello chronicles the story of how Adam Neumann (Jared Leto) went from selling ill-fitting baby clothes to building one of the world’s largest coworking companies and ultimately being ousted from the organization in just a few years. The real Neumann is enough of a self-aggrandizing character that it’s easy to imagine versions of this series that focused solely on him. But WeCrashed knows how crucial the stories of Neumann’s wife Rebekah (Anne Hathaway) and his co-founder Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin) are to understanding the origins of WeWork, its culture, and how a real estate startup managed to convince everyone to see it as a tech company worth investing millions of dollars into.
Because there are always people who might not necessarily have been following the news at the time, WeCrashed chronicles the WeWork story by jumping between significant points in the company’s history, starting in 2019 — the year WeWork’s board of directors moved to remove Neumann as CEO. WeCrashed first introduces Neumann at a time when his reputation as a compelling orator and tenacious entrepreneur had 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 the writing was very much on the wall for Neumann by 2019, WeCrashed shows you how confident he still was in the belief that he’d lead WeWork to a successful IPO because that sort of unwavering faith in himself does seem to have been one of his guiding principles as a founder