Review: Despite Solid Performances, Apple TV’s ‘WeCrashed’ Doesn’t Work
Review
Maybe you should just watch the documentary. This is unfortunately the sentiment that goes along with many of the current slate of shows about scam artists. WeCrashed, Apple TV’s limited drama about the meteoric rise and disastrous fall of unicorn start-up WeWork, is no different.
At the center of WeCrashed is what the series terms a love story (I’m not so convinced but alright). Adam Neumann (Jared Leto) is a broke entrepreneur trying to make it in the big city, who falls for the spiritually oriented Rebekah Paltrow (Anne Hathaway). The series is as invested in this relationship as it is in telling the story of a doomed co-working company run by an egomaniac. This means that anyone who has seen the Hulu documentary, WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, may notice a lot missing from this version of the story, from minor details, like the fact that WeWork made their employees wear tracking bracelets when at the annual summer camp, to big developments, like the WeLive venture, which was co-living space.
Apple TV+
Not that the series doesn’t portray how WeWork dug such a hole for itself—a montage depicting employees securing leases at outrageous prices and terms as part of a business strategy developed by Adam is especially illustrative. But it certainly drops much of the information that’s packed into the documentary. The hyper-focus on Adam and Rebekah also pulls away from screen time that could be spent on victims, including WeWork employees who were overworked, underpaid, and ultimately left with nothing.
This is the general problem with these scammer shows. Adam and Rebekah are fascinating, but audiences want protagonists they can root for, and there aren’t enough significant supporting characters to compensate for it—O-T Fagbenle’s (The Handmaid’s Tale) minor role as Cameron Lautner, a partner at a powerful investment firm and one of the few people in the story deeply skeptical of WeWork provides brief moments of relief. (Hulu’s The Dropout, about the Elizabeth Holmes saga, is only slightly better at this with splashy guest stars in the supporting roles, but still often falls into the same trap.) To be fair, Leto and Hathaway’s performances are immensely strong as the main couple.
The biggest detractor with Leto is that, despite a passable attempt at an accent, he cannot pull off playing an Israeli. He’s also simply too old. Leto is 50, while today Adam Neumann is only 42, the series begins in 2007, and WeWork was started in 2010. You do the math. If you want the incredulity of how such a young person pulled all of this off via sheer charisma, you’re not getting that here. Regardless, Leto successfully mimics Adam’s manic energy and relentlessness. The problem with the character though is that we rarely get to see beyond this to what drives him. We only get a few minor moments to try to puzzle that out: a polished speech about growing up on a kibbutz and missing that shared sense of community, a throwaway line about how on the kibbutz he never owned anything for himself but WeWork is his (this ironically contradicts the previous example), and a surprisingly intimate scene with Rebekah where he responds to her statement that “money doesn’t matter” with “the only people who say that are the ones who always have it.”
The series does a much better job with Rebekah. An episode all about WeWork’s annual summer camp delves deep into her backstory of family drama, including her father’s white-collar crime and losing her brother to cancer, which intersects with her current crisis when her father (Peter Jacobson) is arrested. As WeCrashed progresses, we watch Rebekah become more and more desperate to find any sort of purpose, especially as she gets sidelined by Adam. One particularly amusing gag comes at the couple’s wedding, when people keep asking if Gwyneth Paltrow — Rebekah’s cousin — is coming, to the increasing fury of Rebekah.
The result is that when she makes horrible decisions, we understand why she’s doing them. She puts her foot in her mouth at the summer camp when she gets on stage in the wake of learning of her father’s arrest for financial crimes and says that a woman’s job is to support men. She fires random employees who she perceives as having offended her. America Ferrera is a breath of fresh air as Elishia Kennedy, Rebekah’s new friend and the CEO of a juice empire. When Adam hires Elishia, Rebekah’s privately devastated—Adam took the one thing that was just hers. The show does a great job of explaining Rebekah’s actions without excusing them.
However great Hathaway and Leto are, though, at portraying these insufferable people, the fact remains that we have to watch these people be insufferable. Whenever Rebekah tells Adam that he’s a supernova or that he’s going to “manifest” success, I can’t help but gag. As well done as WeCrashed is—the series definitely captures the aesthetic and party culture of WeWork’s offices, and I’m obsessed with the opening credits—its premise is perhaps flawed. If you want to learn about the appalling actions of these individuals, but have no interest in actually caring about them, you don’t need an eight-episode drama, just the hour and 40-minute documentary.
WeCrashed, Series Premiere, Friday, March 18, Apple TV+
