Stream It Or Skip It: ‘WeCrashed’ On Apple TV+, Where Jared Leto And Anne Hathaway Recreate The Rise And Fall Of WeWork’s Adam Neumann

If you’ve ever plopped your laptop down in a WeWork office, you know about Adam Neumann’s vision. The offices aren’t just a co-working space; they’re places to collaborate and socialize, and come up with big ideas over a game of foosball or a Guinness at happy hour. We were never fans, but we’re pretty antisocial. But those who were fans of the concept ponied up extensive membership fees to use the company’s offices, which allowed WeWork to expand rapidly over less than a decade. But Neumann was removed as CEO in 2019 over myriad issues, including sexual harassment charges. WeCrashed, based on a popular podcast, is a fictionalization of Neumann’s rise and fall.

WECRASHED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Chatter amongst people that a vote has been taken and that the person they’re talking about is a “nutjob”. “Wednesday, September 18, 2019.” A member of the WeWork board (Anthony Edwards) wants CEO Adam Neumann (Jared Leto) to come to the board meeting.

The Gist: Neumann is awakened while sleeping off some events from the night before. His wife Rebekah (Anne Hathaway) is talking to a contractor about how “claustrophobic” her new wide-open kitchen feels. As they head to WeWork’s “Galactic Headquarters,” his bevy of assistants are buzzing, making sure Katy Perry is blasting on the speakers and he has everything he needs. Then he’s told he has to meet the board.

As he walks into their conference room, we flash back 12 years. Neumann is a business student at Baruch College, but he’s already a serial entrepreneur. We see him in a baby boutique trying to sell a product called “Krawlers,” which is baby clothes with kneepads. He can certainly BS his way through a sales pitch, and he certainly isn’t deterred when people say no.

He can also BS his way to a meal, as we see when he convinces a neighbor with some takeout that in his native Israel, people always have neighbors over for a drink, and he and his supermodel sister are competing to see how many neighbors they meet.

During a session at Baruch, Neumann pitches his idea of a communal living space. The guest venture capitalist there as a judge sides with the students, who don’t want to go back to dorm living after college and clean a communal bathroom. The VC tells the self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur” that he’s going to “either be a billionaire or go to prison.”

One fellow student, Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin), does like the pitch and says there’s some office space in a Brooklyn building he can use. Neumann thinks it’s an empty floor, but it’s a utility closet on that floor. To get money for rent, Neumann holds a rooftop party for his neighbors and charges money. That’s where he meets Rebekah, a yoga instructor who is cousins with Gwyneth Paltrow.

He doggedly pursues her, and when they finally have a drink, they call each other out on how much they’re bullshitting people. But when he goes to her “yogi” and demands she get paid more, she falls for him.

Neumann and McKelvey try to get Randall (Ajay Naidu), who manages their building, to rent them the empty floor for a co-working space, a concept McKelvey calls “Greendesk,” where the promise is that not only will people be able to have office space, but it’ll be an incubator of sorts, with people socializing and generating partnerships and ideas over ping-pong, happy hours and more.

But Neumann wants to expand his concept around the world, and he knows he needs to start in Manhattan. He convinces McKelvey to sell Greendesk and they pursue not only Manhattan office space but an investor; Neumann gives the company a ridiculous valuation, but he manages to get that investor.

Flash forward to 2019. The board, after a Wall Street Journal piece that talks about Neumann’s money shenanigans and drug use, not only delays the planned IPO, but has voted him out as WeWork’s CEO.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Given there’s been a spate of shows about disgraced tech founders lately, it’s not a stretch that WeCrashed reminds us of Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber and The Dropout. And if you enjoyed the 2021 documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, you’ll find much of this familiar, and wildly entertaining.

Our Take: It feels like we alternated between enjoyment and annoyance while we were watching WeCrashed. We enjoyed that the show’s creators, Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello, treated Neumann with less storytelling reverence than the two aforementioned shows treated Travis Kalanick and Elizabeth Holmes. But we were also annoyed that Neumann, who was viewed with doubts even before he was removed as WeWork’s CEO, is being portrayed as anything other than a really good salesperson.

We also enjoyed the heck out of Hathaway’s portrayal as Rebekah Neumann, with her deep voice and ability to simultaneously see through her husband’s bullshit and encourage him to expand his horizons. But we were annoyed at Leto’s accent, which is somewhat close to Neumann’s, but not really. However, we did appreciate his commitment to embodying Neumann’s young hustler persona.

But overall we enjoyed WeCrashed because its humor isn’t forced and it strives to balance reverence with ridiculousness. It doesn’t always succeed; there are moments where it seems to treat Neumann’s salesmanship as something miraculous. But we think there’s enough skepticism in the narrative to show Neumann’s foibles, both in terms of how he worked the finances of WeWork and the sexual harassment charges that were levied against the company.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode; we see Neumann and Rebekah before and after the act, but not during.

Parting Shot: As the Neumanns exit the building after Adam’s ouster as CEO, Rebekah tells an assistant, “Call the lawyers.” When asked which one, she says, “All of them.”

Sleeper Star: Kyle Marvin has the unenviable task of having to play the levelheaded Miguel, between two scenery-chewing Oscar winners in Leto and Hathaway, and he holds his own with both.

Most Pilot-y Line: Not really a criticism, but we’ve been studying WeWork for a long time, and the idea of being in a co-working space where people socialize gives us the heebie jeebies. Suffice to say, we like staying in our cave, watching and writing about TV, just fine, thanks.

Our Call: STREAM IT. WeCrashed isn’t perfect, but Hathaway’s performance (and Leto’s, to a lesser extent) and the fact that Adam Neumann’s at times shown to be the hustler he is sold us on wanting to watch more.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.