Apple TV+’s WeCrashed is finally done, which means we can finally stop looking at the hollow eyes of Jared Leto as WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. The company can’t go public while Adam remains CEO. But Adam doesn’t ever want to not be CEO.
He left WeWork in terrible shape before the board kicked him to the curb, and the only solutions are expensive ones. If you’re still invested in this story, god bless. But the time for some of these people to face consequences was long, long ago.
WeCrashed recap: ‘The One With All the Money’
In the series finale, titled “The One With All the Money,” WeWork is about to go public — but everything goes wrong. The S1 that Adam and Rebekah Neumann (played by Anne Hathaway) produced is a glorified PowerPoint presentation. The company is being heavily investigated by journalists, thanks to the increased scrutiny as WeWork nears the stock exchange. Every embarrassing misstep along the way is about to come out.
With Wall Street watching, the board votes to remove Adam as CEO. Even Bruce Dunlevie (Anthony Edwards), Adam’s longtime champion at Benchmark Capital, finally turns on him. Adam tries to counter this by suing or firing everyone on the board, but that’s illegal. So he asks his lawyers if they can just change New York law to make him answerable to no one. Shockingly, nobody goes for that idea.
Miguel (Kyle Marvin), meanwhile, tres to boost morale at the WeWork offices, but everyone sees they’re about to get screwed. Everyone’s furious. They worked for nothing, believing that their shares (which frequently took the place of wages) would be valuable one day. Without an IPO, no one gets anything. And there’s a good chance that everyone gets fired without a severance package. Everyone who spent wildly believing they were going to be millionaires is about to be in a lot of debt.
WeWork enters full meltdown mode
A crisis PR firm suggests WeWork should keep a low profile. When Adam hears that, he immediately performs a high-profile exodus from his office, carrying boxes of files down the street with a caravan of workers in tow. So much for that.
Adam also tries to conference with Bruce, but there’s no defusing this situation. It’s always going to be intractable as long as Adam is anywhere near work. Still, Adam cannot imagine a world where he’s not in charge of WeWork. So what’s the point of negotiating with him?
“You’re toxic,” Bruce finally says, too late for it to matter. “You killed the company.” (It proves truly satisfying to see someone tell Jared Leto that he’ll break his arm.)
Adam calls Masayoshi Son (Eui-sung Kim) in a last-ditch to save himself, but the SoftBank founder refuses to help. It’s over. Soon, Adam is seeing spies in every passerby and idling neighbor. Every time he leaves the house, people take pictures of him (which quickly go viral). He’s a laughingstock. As he always should have been.
Adam Neumann deserved all this and more
Miguel tries to console Adam. “I love you, but you don’t deserve this,” Miguel says, which is a nice assist from the writers. Adam did deserve this. He was a liar who possessed no business sense. He took advantage of hundreds of people, fostered a climate of drunken sexual harassment, and made promises he had no intention of keeping. Of course Adam deserved this. He deserved worse.
Cameron Lautner (O-T Fagbenle) gets put in charge but he inherits a disaster. Before he left, Adam bought twice as many new leases for buildings as WeWork owned, so now the company is hemorrhaging money. They want to approach Masa but he won’t join the company unless Adam is out.
Unfortunately, Adam won’t relinquish his shares on the cheap. He gouges Masa for more than a billion dollars, and then Masa and SoftBank take over the company. Then Talking Heads play on the soundtrack, celebrating Adam’s safe departure from the company. I really don’t like this show.
The smart one or the crazy one
WeCrashed does finally give us some of what we want in this last episode. Obviously, everyone dressing down Adam Neumann makes for good TV. But it’s really only so good because we’ve had to watch this little corpse worm for the last eight hours. The show isn’t really allowed to take much glee in his downfall, because it was so interested in his rise.
I like when Masa calls Rebekah and informs her that they won’t be paying Adam any of the money he’s supposedly owed. That felt good, but too little, too late. Also, Hathaway and Leto comically oversell the last moments. It shouldn’t feel so cartoonish watching them get their comeuppance. And it really should last longer than a few seconds before the series’ ending crawl.
There just isn’t any fun to be had in this show — not in the party montages, or the expensive art and alcohol, or in the blinkered selfishness of the leads, or even in their long-overdue downfall. I sincerely hope the era of Scam TV is coming to a close. I don’t know how much more time I can spend watching rich people pretend to be other rich people who teach rich people lessons about being rich.
Watch WeCrashed on Apple TV+
You can stream all eight episodes of limited series WeCrashed on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
