The brash lead characters in three new high-profile limited series proclaim they are “changing the world” as they throw around other people’s money in pursuit of “disruption” while leading “unicorn” companies.
It’s common lingo inSilicon Valleybut less so on our TV screens until now, with shows about controversial real-life startup CEOs premiering practically on top of each other.
Showtime’s“Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,”starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, kicks things off Sunday, Feb. 27, followed by Hulu’s“The Dropout,”with Amanda Seyfried as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes on Thursday, March 3. “WeCrashed,” featuring Jared Leto as WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Rebekah,premieres March 18 on Apple TV+.
These follow a tradition of storytelling focused on the most powerful among us, said Brian Koppelman, a showrunner on “Super Pumped.”
Amanda Seyfried on empathizing with Elizabeth Holmes during filming of ‘The Dropout’
“You are writing about modern kings and gods — people trying to take territory, doing whatever they can to take it,” Koppelman told The Chronicle during a video chat that included fellow showrunners David Levien and Beth Schacter. “It’s about who grabs power and what they do with the power. The power now isn’t necessarily having a musket, but having different kinds of tools, or pretending to (have them).”
Like all the most fascinating leaders throughout history, Kalanick, Holmes and Neumann all had what Koppelman calls “clay feet,” or fatal flaws.
Kalanick helped transform the transportation industry but resigned as CEO of San Francisco’s Uber in 2017 amid reports of a toxic work culture that included sexual harassment and gender discrimination.
Holmes, who founded the Palo Alto blood-test startup Theranos at 19 and became Silicon Valley’s most celebrated new star, was convicted in January onfour federal fraud charges.
The exuberant Neumann built extraordinary buzz around the New York company WeWork, a quasi-tech company that turned floors of office buildings into coworking spaces he promoted as the basis for a new, utopian “we” world. Neumann drew billions in venture capital and spent lavishly on expansion efforts and wild company parties, before stepping down in 2019 after an initial public offering was postponed.
The fact that the three shows are coming out in 2022 makes sense on a timing level, given the typical lag time between TV projects’ inception and release, the pandemic and their source material: “Super Pumped” is inspired by a 2019 book by Mike Isaac; “The Dropout” and “WeCrashed” are based on popular podcasts from 2019 and 2020.
These stories’ big-rise, big-fall narratives also signal the growing cultural cynicism toward big tech amid its many recent troubles, including theFacebook whistle-blower scandalin 2021.
“It feels like we are having a bit of a reckoning with the kind of stories we were told about a lot of tech companies in the early 2000s,” said Elizabeth Meriwether, showrunner of “The Dropout” and creator of the long-running Fox sitcom “New Girl.”
Meriwether said she went all in for tech when she was younger, buying a candy-colored iMac and embracing the arrival of Facebook. She remembers “leaving college and having these stars in my eyes about a lot of these startups,” she said. There seemed no limit to “all the things you could do with data.”
“I really bought into the mythology of it,” Meriwether added. Now, “It feels like it has finally reached a point where people are starting to question what we thought we knew about these companies.”
Watching episodes of the three new shows can feel, cumulatively, like its own new tech — a kind of direct-delivery system for schadenfreude enabled by each lead character coming off worse than the last. (Spoiler alert: Gordon-Levitt’s bro-tastic Kalanick, who lacks the altruistic aims the other two at least claim to have, is the worst).
These characters’ inevitable comedowns inspire a feeling of justice that might not have been present even a few years ago. But after a two-year pandemic, in which many people lost jobs but Jeff Bezos somehow made it to space, seeing a cocky startup CEO — any cocky startup CEO — called out for hubris brings a certain satisfaction.
“Tech companies are increasingly a favorite target,” said Jill Finlayson, the director of UC’s Expanding Diversity and Gender Equity in Tech Initiative in Berkeley. “People are pointing the finger at them from both ends of the increasingly divisive political spectrum. Some argue the efforts to stop misinformation are taking too long, and others feel disproportionately targeted.”
The recent criticism also targets “the long-standing impacts of a lack of diversity in tech,” added Finlayson, a Silicon Valley veteran and former eBay senior category manager. This issue is brought into sharper relief by Bezos and Elon Musk building rockets.
“The growing wealth gap and the audacity of the wealthy founders makes them especially appealing targets and outlets for those struggling to get by after COVID,” she said.
The creators of “Super Pumped” did not have audience hunger for comeuppance in mind when making their show, Levien and Schacter said.
“I don’t think we ever sat around and said, ‘And then, at the end, when he loses his company, they are really going tolovethat,’” Levien said.
The showrunners — also collaborators on the Showtime finance-world drama “Billions” — approached the Uber story with the belief audiences would be most interested in the legitimate successes that preceded Kalanick’s fall.
“He wasn’t a scam artist,” Schacter said. “We all have Uber on our phones. It truly revolutionized culture. So then you are asking the audience, ‘at what cost?’ ”
Silicon Valley’s culture, like its tech, is ever evolving, and might have cycled out of the iterations from the past decade that these shows depict.
“Silicon Valley still has a long way to go, but some tech companies are making concerted efforts to improve the culture, including Uber,” Finlayson said. For instance, the company’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Bo Young Lee, “is actively engaging the company in a number of inclusivity challenges, and Twitter deliberately hiredtechnology’s biggest criticsto develop more ethical AI.”
And the world will be watching. More shows and movies about real-life tech CEOs are in the works. Koppelman, Levien and Schacter, who shot part of “Super Pumped” in San Francisco, will focusthe next seasonof what they envision as a “Pumped” anthology series on the relationship between Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operations Officer “Metamate” Sheryl Sandberg. Based on a forthcoming book by Isaac, the second season will compete with a recently announced HBO project that has Claire Foy (“The Crown”) attached to play Sandberg. Holmes’ story is also set to receive theAdam McKay treatmentin an Apple Studios project reuniting McKay and “Don’t Look Up” star Jennifer Lawrence.
但“超级注入”选集系列不会necessarily focus on tech, the show’s creators added. “It is always going to be about an entrepreneurial story that feels like an important one for the world,” Levien said.
These days, most of those stories just happen to center on the tech world.
“Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber”(TV-MA) premieres at 10 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 27, on Showtime.“The Dropout”(TV-MA) premieres Thursday, March 3, on Hulu.“WeCrashed”(TV-MA) premieres March 18 on Apple TV+.