Jared Leto

The Apple TV Plus's miniseries focuses on the mutually delusional marriage that almost destroyed WeWork.

TV A professional critic’s assessment of a service, product, performance, or artistic or literary workJared Leto and Anne Hathaway’s ‘WeCrashed,’ about WeWork’s fall, is as essential as a WeWork in a pandemicJared Leto and Anne Hathaway as Adam and Rebekah Neumann in “WeCrashed.” (Apple TV Plus)On a good day in 2016, WeWork, the office-share chain, would only lose $1.2 million in a 24-hour period. Of the two, Rebekah, a vegan yoga teacher haunted by the kind of existential aimlessness that only those with no bills to pay can afford, is the slightly more sympathetic character; not a one of her several therapists can disabuse her of what she knows deep down to be true: There’s absolutely nothing special about her.“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 (not unlike Leto’s “House of Gucci”). The New York-set miniseries spans roughly a decade, with the couple meeting-cute at a party Adam throws trying to gin up cash for he and his pushover business partner Miguel McKelvey’s (Kyle Marvin) first iteration of WeWork. As previewed in the pilot, Adam will become in just a few years the company’s most toxic asset. (When he’s about to lose their company, Rebekah gives him a few moments to process the news, then chides, “Are we done pouting?”) A perpetually underrated actor despite her Oscar, Hathaway — perfectly mimicking the real-life Paltrow Neumann’s patronizing noblesse-oblige contralto — brings coherence to a character who desperately wishes she had a core.The series’ strengths also include lavish production values and a diverting escalation in Adam and Rebekah’s ambitions and self-regard, which culminate in her starting a private school called WeGrow that’ll “feed our children’s souls.” But if you’re wondering whether you should just learn about the Neumanns’ outrageously expensive and extravagantly silly antics through the Hulu doc or one of the countless exposés about the couple, well, maybe you should. But perhaps because it’s from Apple TV Plus, the drama, based on the podcast of the same name, retreats from any larger critique of the tech industry (in one of the first, and certainly most prominent, instances of Silicon Valley putting forth a narrative about itself through television). So we’re back to square one, wondering why, other than the very big numbers being thrown around, ordinary people are supposed to give a hoot about demigods pilfering from one another’s Scrooge McDuck-like vaults.The best that creators Drew Crevello and Lee Eisenberg come up with is the delusion-fueled marriage between Adam (Leto) and Rebekah (Hathaway), an amoral striver and a coddled dilettante who bring out the best and worst in each other. Previous versions of this story, like the 2021 Hulu documentary “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn,” have used Neumann as a poster child for the now banal (if no less correct) observation of how thin the line in Silicon Valley can be between visionary and fraudster. That figure would soon double, though, as co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann, its shoe-shunning master salesman, sought to “elevate the world’s consciousness” — his company’s official mission — by out-franchising Starbucks. But what does it mean to lose $400 million in a single year?