WeCrashed offers a bad return on investment – The A.V. Club

As far as not-so-great ideas go, WeCrashed isn’t quite as misguided as the multi-billion dollar mayhem it recaps. But boy howdy if it doesn’t match former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann pound-for-pound on crappy decision-making, hapless showmanship, and missed opportunities to get back to basics.

Streaming its first three episodes on March 18 (the rest will come weekly after that), the eight-episode limited series from Apple TV+ is the most recent telling of Neumann’s meteoric rise and cataclysmic decline at WeWork.

The nebulously defined real estate company, which Neumann championed as both an innovative co-working startup and revolutionary effort to “change the world,” famously went from a $47 billion valuation to threat of bankruptcy in just six weeks during the summer of 2019.

Search “WeWork CEO” online and–once you’ve scrolled past its new, less quirky leadership–you’ll find countless articles rehashing the zany entrepreneur’s explosive time manifesting and then mangling a so-called unicorn company. (For those new to venture capitalist lingo: A financial “unicorn” is any privately held startup valued at at least $1 billion.)

Assuming audiences actually want a dramatization of the WeWork saga–which, speaking generously here, is iffy–there are plenty of splashy stories from Neumann’s downfall to put on screen. There’s that time he reportedly hot boxed a private jet, then forgot to deplane his drugs; those rumors that he claimed to have plans for becoming “president of the world” and taking WeWork to Mars; that viral photo of him walking frantic–and barefoot–in New York City mere hours before losing his role as CEO; not to mention, the countless presentations, press briefings, batshit ragers, and resultant lawsuits that saw the hard-partying Israeli businessman snag headlines years before his notorious unseating.

With all that inspiration to draw from, it’s a bit of a marvel then that WeCrashed creators Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello don’t deliver a more entertaining show. Despite its impressively detailed set and what looks like a spare-no-expense production design, Apple TV+’s slick recreation isn’t a fraction as fun as seeing the real thing in the Hulu documentary WeWork: Or The Making And Breaking Of A $47 Billion Unicorn, and it isn’t nearly as insightful as the 2020 Wondery podcast on which WeCrashed is loosely based. (For what it’s worth, Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell’s The Cult Of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, And The Great Startup Delusion remains the most informative WeWork explainer on the market–and, depending on your reading speed, is only marginally longer than the super-stretched TV series.)

WeCrashed places extra emphasis on the relationship between Neumann and his equally unusual wife and former WeWork executive Rebekah (whose maiden name is Paltrow, and, yes, is cousins with that Paltrow), which helps differentiate it from solo Silicon Valley character studies The Dropout and Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

But stars Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, who deftly play the Neumanns as hyper-passionate yuppies with little to no understanding of consequence, can’t act their way into a story that just isn’t clicking. The primary problem with WeCrashed is its stunning reluctance to say much of anything with its source material—be it about millennials’ crumbling vision of hustle culture, the practical limits on delusions of grandeur, or even the demands of being in a high-profile, scandal-ridden marriage.

The poorly constructed narrative instead presents a muddy, nonlinear collection of events that sometimes creates clever connections between the Neumanns’ beginnings and WeWork’s undoing–but more often appears as a cliché and confused waste of actors better than the erratic editing and direction that frames their performances. (Seriously, very few series can justify having this many goofy smash cuts–and WeCrashed isn’t one of them.)

Those sorts of cringe-worthy miscalculations punctuate a show that’s otherwise so stale it might as well have already come out. Endless arguments in WeWork boardrooms and at WeWork construction sites between Adam, Rebekah, and co-founder Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin) are broken up by almost as many party montages–bringing to mind dozens of similar TV shows and movies about wealthy disruptors that are by and large better than this one.

The fights aren’t as smart as the ones in something like the extraordinarily well-written The Social Network, and the parties aren’t as wild as the ones portrayed in something like the bonkers The Wolf Of Wall Street. So the half-baked sameness of the party-fight-party-fight cycle simply washes over the screen, overwhelming the show’s more original ideas with a deluge of exhausting knockoffs that range from boring and forgettable to contrived and overwritten.

Select scenes breakthrough the derivative disappointment and most of those center on Hathaway. Rebekah’s peak villain moments are genuinely enjoyable, in part because they allow Hathaway to revisit the dynamic of her beloved Devil Wears Prada performance from Meryl Streep’s character’s POV. (Look out for a monologue between Rebekah and an assistant in episode six that’s all but copied from the Miranda Priestly playbook.)

Plus, when Hathaway is placed opposite America Ferrera, whose role as the fictional Alishia Kennedy appears to be modeled after the real-world nightmare of SoulCycle’s Julie Rice, the actors light up with refreshingly believable tension. (It’s worth noting that this and other storylines from WeCrashed depart considerably from the facts reported.)

Leto doesn’t fare as well with his outrageous CEO, though that seems to stem mainly from lackluster direction. Not only is the actor’s performance hampered by a remarkably distracting nose prosthetic, but his take on the character is so intensely energetic throughout that it borders on one-note.

Scene after scene, Leto bombasts with his big accent and even bigger hand gestures. It’s how the real Adam Neumann behaves, yes, but it’s difficult to watch let alone find compelling. Even in quieter beats, like when the subtle dimension of frenetic genius flits across Adam’s eyes mid-sell (no one said Leto can’t act!), the fatigue of it all may still leave you thinking, “This guy again?”

It’s a question that could apply to the series as a whole. At its best, this painfully uninspired WeWork redux is a redundant, montage-heavy account of facts told more completely elsewhere. At its worst, WeCrashed is a clumsy, ill-advised memorialization of selfish behavior, inexplicably propping up Adam and Rebekah Neumann for yet another dose of outsized attention.

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