TV Struggles to Put Silicon Valley on the Screen

From WeCrashed to Super Pumped, Hollywood is still too infatuated with founders.
Jared Leto standing in office with coworkers buzzing around him in production still from Apple TV series WeCrashed
From WeCrashed to Super Pumped, tech TV still glorifies its founders.Courtesy of Apple TV+

The first scene in the new Apple TV+ series WeCrashed perfectly sets up the saga that is about to unfold: WeWork’s board of directors has just voted to remove its founder, Adam Neumann, from the company. Neumann, meanwhile, has just woken up; the hired help brings him a bong in bed. “Rise and grind,” he shouts as he emerges, hungover. He has no idea that he is an entrepreneurial Icarus, his wax wings about to melt.

The plot of WeCrashed should feel familiar at this point. WeWork’s story is practically startup mythology, and a tale made for TV: a bombastic entrepreneur who wants to “elevate the world’s consciousness”; his deific wife, who believes billion-dollar valuations can be “manifested”; and a cast of millennial employees who are equally convinced that they are changing the world and that the office’s free tequila shots are a reasonable substitute for a 401K. The magic of WeCrashed isn’t bringing the story to life—that’s been done before, in books, documentaries, and podcasts. It’s in making Neumann seem human, despite the details you already know.

WeCrashed, which premieres Friday, is one of three new television shows that dramatize familiar startup narratives. Showtime’s Super Pumped, which focuses on the rise and fall of Uber, debuted at the end of February. Hulu’s The Dropout, about Theranos, came out earlier this month. Each begins with a relentless founder on their way to change the world and ends with those founders severed from their companies and their dreams.

None of these entrepreneurs are especially likable. Uber’s Travis Kalanick (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) alienates everyone in his life while building his company and says tech douche bro things like: “We fuck the status quo!” Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes (played by Amanda Seyfried) becomes increasingly frazzled, and her hair increasingly frizzy, as she lies to buy more time building her product. But we also catch glimpses of moments that are apparently supposed to show the pressure they’re under. These aren’t just entrepreneurs; they’re people.

Hollywood has long had a fascination with Silicon Valley—its villains and its heroes. Directors have portrayed the industry as either courageous and world-altering (The Social Network, Steve Jobs) or fearsome and world-ruining (Devs, Black Mirror). The rare show like Silicon Valley captures the truth in between, winking at tech workers who are in on the jokes. Every plot point that seemed too absurd for reality—coders living in a hacker hostel, “Shazam for food,” a major company creating “moonshot” tech to help monkeys masturbate—was pulled directly from real life.

Recent depictions of startup life are less astute. While Super Pumped gets many of the details right, it glorifies Kalanick by making the story revolve around him. It has a strange way of depicting Uber’s employees, who always seem to be sprawled out on couches in the open-plan office so that they are perpetually poised for one of Kalanick’s rousing speeches. In the first two episodes alone, there are four separate scenes where Uber employees whoop for their CEO like high school football fans cheering for a quarterback. Kalanick was larger-than-life, sure, but his employees were people too. In Super Pumped, they come off more like props.

The Dropout falls into a similar trap. The eight-episode limited series shows Theranos coming together to hoot and holler for Holmes, as if she is a modern pop star. In one scene, Holmes announces to the office that Theranos has received FDA approval to do herpes tests. “We’ve! Got! Herpes!” she says in her guttural voice. Then people actually stand up on their seats and start chanting: “THER-A-NOS! THER-A-NOS!”

It’s not quite the vision of Theranos depicted in more thorough accounts, like John Carreyrou’s best-selling book Bad Blood. (Carreyrou is also a minor character in The Dropout.) That book told the story of Theranos through its employees, its investors, the people who used its technology, and the people who lifted Holmes up. They all make an appearance in the show, as well, but the focus is centered more directly on Holmes. The Dropout tries to fill in the blanks for all of the motivations Holmes never shared: The mysteriously deep voice, the intentionally frizzy hair, the closet of identical black turtlenecks—all of these things made her a bit of a mystery. Was that her real voice? Did she wear other things on the weekends? Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes is one of a girlish ingénue who sings aloud in her car and initiates dance parties behind closed doors. It’s a sweet interpretation, and maybe one that’s true. But it’s also entirely made up.

WeCrashed, on the other hand, doesn’t have to imagine what its founder was like behind closed doors. There’s plenty of archival footage of him selling the company in its early days, ripping shots with employees at mandatory retreats, or openly farting in front of camera crews. That also makes WeCrashed the most fun to watch. Like the other startup shows, it focuses largely on its founder: Neumann (played by Jared Leto) and his wife Rebekah (Anne Hathaway). The show at times feels more like their love story than a series about a growing company. But that’s exactly why it works. All successful startups get traction because of their founders, sometimes even more than their ideas. Of the three founders, Leto’s Neumann is the only one you can actually imagine investing in.

A decade ago, tech portrayals in film and TV made minor-league gods out of their protagonists. The Social Network painted Mark Zuckerberg as a boy hero, and Steve Jobs fed into the cultish worship of Apple’s founder. These new shows are no different, it's just that their heroes fly too close to the Silicon Valley sun. In The Dropout, Theranos becomes the story of an ambitious woman who had to grow up too fast. Super Pumped becomes a study of an ego grown too big. WeCrashed is about a married couple feasting on their own bullshit. All of them are cheered on, but not everyone wins.

There are plenty of reasons to watch all three: Super Pumped will appeal to Valley insiders, who will delight in the portrayals of Larry Page, Bill Gurley, and Ariana Huffington. The Dropout is worth it just to see Seyfried drop into “the voice.” And WeCrashed is one of the most entertaining pieces of television to land this year, with delightful performances and whip-smart screenwriting. But each one misses out on moments to zoom the camera out and focus on who else was impacted by their dramatic rise, and their equally dramatic fall. Perhaps second seasons could widen the frame from the founders and give us the untold stories of everyone else.

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