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Shows such as WeCrashed, Super Pumped and The Dropout all retell recent stories of millennial work-life balance going wrong
The third episode of WeCrashed, Apple TV+’s eight-part series on the precipitous rise and fall of the WeWork founders Adam and Rebekah Neumann, gives the viewer a small taste of being a startup employee. It’s 2012, and a nameless female employee arrives for her first day; she’s given a key card, an Apple laptop, a reminder that there’s a 7pm “Thank God It’s Monday” meeting, and a mimosa. In one of the most effective montages of the series – largely because it draws attention away from the two eccentric, delusional founders who take up the vast majority of screen time – we whirl through the nameless female employee’s hedonistic, exhausting life at WeWork. Coffee, shot, staff party, sex with a co-worker in a supply closet. Adam Neumann leading employees in a “we!” “work!” call and response. Another shot, another day, pass out, wake up, repeat. Is it night or is it noon? At a desk or at a party? Doesn’t matter – she’s at work, which is life.
This ethos of so-called “hustle culture” – the idea that work is life and the self derives value through constant work – courses throughout a number of recent shows set across the 2010s. It’s most overt in WeCrashed, based on the Wondery podcast of the same name, in which Neumann literally urges workers to “hustle harder” (also the title of its fifth episode, which airs this Friday). The Theranos employees in The Dropout, Hulu’s eight-part series on Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent blood-testing company that was once the darling of Silicon Valley, work through the night, missing kids’ birthday parties and dinners in the name of changing the world. Same for the Uber staff in Super Pumped, Showtime’s series on Uber’s relentless, now disgraced founder Travis Kalanick, who berates employees to pursue growth at any cost (and change the world.) Anna Delvey, the scammer at the heart of Netflix’s Inventing Anna, is most chagrined that her notoriety as the “Soho grifter” overshadowed how hard she worked at the business plan that ultimately exposed her; the journalist who covers her is so obsessed with the story and its import for her career that she goes into labor in the office.
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