WeCrashed, Apple TV
WeCrashed is one of the most damning indictments on real world public figures I can remember. Apple’s latest glossy, expensive TV offering follows the real-life events of the WeWork company as they went from nothing, to a 47-billion-dollar brand, back to… not exactly nothing…9 billion.
The butt of the joke in this series is not the company itself, it’s WeWork’s former CEO and Chief Brand and Impact Officer, husband and wife, Adam and Rebekah Neumann.
As mentioned above, I can’t think of a more comprehensive and brutal attack on people that actually exist. Adam (played by Jared Leto) comes across as a buffoon with a few productive qualities, but his wife Rebekah emerges from WeCrashed as an irredeemably vapid, superficial and entitled…idiot.
It’s not clear what their motives were in being so savage (there are hints in the series that the Neumanns might deserve it) but the creators of WeCrashed pull zero punches in their betrayal of Rebekah in particular.
There’s a scene in which her dad is asked to repeat to a courtroom that he is “a fraud”. There’s an episode that follows Rebekah indulging her fantasy of becoming an actor, only for Anne Hathaway to show her amazing acting range in portraying Rebekah as a comparably terrible actor.
Throughout the series, Rebekah repeatedly tells herself and her husband to “manifest” things - something which in her mouth is made to sound nothing more than the entitled expectation that the privileged should be allowed to have and do whatever they want.
A clip doing the rounds on Twitter from Episode Seven shows Rebekah crying for animals and suffering children when she appears as a guest on a radio show. It’s something that happened almost word for word in real life and, again owing to another brutally brilliant portrayal from Hathaway, paints Rebekah as the worst of the virtue signaling, superficial elite.
A damning portrayal of Adam and Rebekah Neumann is the main driving force of WeCrashed. Public trashings aside, the show is very watchable throughout. Anyone who enjoyed the capitalist buzz you get from watching The Social Network will enjoy seeing WeWork go from nothing to something. The show should also be commended for its ability to reduce complex financial concepts into easily digestible drama.
The WeWork crash was covered as a soap opera as it happened in real life. It makes sense that it makes for a pretty decent soap opera.
