WeCrashed

A sensational blend of docudrama, heart, comedy, and drama that is one of 2022’s best miniseries.

Altogether a compelling tale whose drama grows ever greater, not least in the final chapters packed with tension.

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.

It’s a wonderful and deeply enjoyable tale of rags to riches to (relative) rags, but it panders to the viewer’s schadenfreude instead of offering anything meatier, or any wider perspective or criticism.

When Leto and Hathaway are on-screen together (and that’s much of the show, whose strapline is “A Love Story Worth $47bn”) there is that special alchemy that shows like Big Little Lies and True Detective achieve.

The series sags in the middle episodes after an exciting start. The propulsion returns at the end, but viewers have to get there to enjoy it. ... Even if you know how the WeWork story ends, it's an enthralling ride to the inevitable implosion.

So, yes, you’ll have fun watching WeCrashed, even if the rhythms of the story are a little cliched.

The series fully captures the Monopoly-money quality of the startup era, the sense that nothing is quite real and certainly not relatable to most people on the planet. If this is a little sickening, it can also be wildly entertaining.

If nothing else, WeCrashed is a testament to just how long money — or the illusion of it — will insulate narcissists from consequences, and the slow burn of its progression makes the show all the more tantalizingly agonizing

Leto and Hathway are far more dominant than the holes poked in their subjects, and their performances more enjoyable than their characters are contemptible. Perhaps it’s easier to wonder at Neumann than be reminded of his sins, but that’s hardly an impression warranting another visit.

Bad Entrepreneur TV isn’t thrilling; it’s comfort food. ... As the show made its way toward its final episodes, it seemed to me that it, too, was beginning to go through the motions. More money, more pressure, more problems, more ambitions, more New Age drivel. I wanted to go back to the start, to looser jokes and mesh muscle tanks.

This cautionary tale about the flameout of the $47 billion workplace startup WeWork feels like a terrific two-hour movie trapped in a gallingly repetitive eight-hour miniseries, but Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway dazzle as the founding couple who come to believe their own lies.

It treads familiar ground to other rise-and-fall cautionary tales, and somewhat lacks a point of view — but WeCrashed is still farcically entertaining, buoyed by Jared Leto’s electric performance as Adam Neumann.

The show seems overtly fascinated with Adam Neumann's con, dramatized through pop-music fueled montages and an ever-present "Can you believe this guy?" tone. But the consequences of his financial shell-game — many of which fell on his overworked, underpaid workforce — are largely treated as an afterthought.

“WeCrashed” never lets us — or failed actress Rebekah — forget she is a cousin of Gwyneth’s. But the show never leans fully into camp or cattiness, frustratingly stuck instead somewhere between dishy and humanizing.

WeCrashed plays the pair’s inanities completely straight without winking or nudging, leaving us in the audience to blink or howl or shake our heads in disbelief. ... WeCrashed struggles when it comes time to deliver some grander takeaway after all the time it’s spent lingering over the details of recent history.

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.

WeCrashed ultimately shares something in common with its subject matter in one key respect: Despite a pair of Oscar winners front and center in Leto and Hathaway, it looks better on paper then it does once you start wading through the fine print.

The series is undeniably slick. Where it falters, then, is how much it hammers the same dynamics over and over again, failing to justify its eight-hour run time as it defaults to the repetitive loops of Adam converting skeptics, Rebekah finding her place in his kingdom, and their attempts to reign supreme over it all. Even the “crash” itself takes seven episodes to reach, somehow.