Animation
Shape Island
Shape Island may charm little viewers and won’t bend their parents out of shape. But the show can also feel surprisingly flat.
In 2007, Adam Neumann styled himself as a “serial entrepreneur.” Some might’ve called him a serial failure.
He didn’t lack for confidence, but his ideas could’ve used a little work: Baby onesies with kneepads. Women’s shoes with retractable heels. He thought he had a winner with a “concept living” idea—where cash-strapped New Yorkers could live together, pool their costs and share life with each other.
But when one of his business college classmates said it sounded like a dorm—only a dorm where you had to clean your own bathrooms—the idea lost its luster.
Still, one potential investor was impressed with Adam’s moxie, if not his concepts. “I think you’re either going to be a billionaire, or you’re going to get arrested,” he said.
Or, maybe, both?
Fast-forward a few years, and Adam, wife Rebekah and business partner Miguel McKelvey have one of the hottest startups in the country.
It’s called WeWork, and it’s not so different from Adam’s failed communal dorm project. The main difference is that instead of living communally, you’re working communally: tiny startups laboring alongside tiny startups in massive, mostly-open office spaces loaded with shared spots that might help get the creative juices flowing. Over here you’ll find a meeting spot filled with beanbag chairs. There, a foosball table. Oh, and back there? An open bar, stocked with kombucha in the morning, alcohol in the evening.
Investors are falling all over themselves to invest in WeWork, swayed by Miguel’s savvy plans and charmed by Adam’s oily schmooze.
But all is not well behind WeWork’s gleaming doors. Rumors of drug use follow Adam through the halls. He and Rebekah are glamorous, no doubt. But they’re also narcissistic, eccentric and erratic as well, churning through cash as if it was grain in a mill.
Oh, and seems like WeWork should, y’know, show a profit sometime, right?
WeCrashed, starring Oscar winners Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto, kinda spoils its own story right in its own title. Not that the real headlines wouldn’t have done so anyway.
WeWork was indeed one of the hottest startups in the world in 2019—valued at more than $47 billion shortly before its stock was set to go public in September of that year. After series of scandalous stories and worrying disclosures, the WeWork board voted to boot the real Adam Neumann out of any sort of serious role with the company, retaining him only as a “consultant” for the bargain-basement price of $46 million. That’s $46 million a year.
The show itself might feel, at least to families, like a bit of a ripoff, too.
Though the performances are compelling and the story itself interesting, WeCrashed might as well be called WeCussed. Aaron and Rebekah engage in plenty of make-out sessions. And while we don’t see anything critical (at least in the early going), you don’t need much imagination to know what’s happening. (Their conversations can get frank, too; and if the show follows its real-life template, Adam’s eye may wander.)
WeCrashed isn’t the most salacious show out there by any stretch, but its content certainly warrants its TV-MA rating. And it doesn’t come with much of a payoff to justify its excesses. Which describes WeWork when Adam ran the thing, now that I think about it.
We first meet Adam and Rebekah at the apparent height of their power and wealth: He’s smoking a marijuana bong before he gets out of bed, and she’s telling a remodeler that the Feng Shui in her kitchen is all wrong. That’s right before they head off to the WeWork boardroom for an emergency meeting. But most of the episode is told in flashback, as Adam and Rebekah meet, Adam and business partner Miguel McKelvey join forces, and the forerunner to WeWork—an effort known as Green Space—takes root.
Adam is flat broke as the story begins, but his talent for using other people to get what he wants keeps him afloat and fed. His charm doesn’t work on Rebekah when they first meet: He essentially stalks her for quite a while, telling her he’s “peacocking” her and later makes a suggestive remark that he’ll “rupture” her groin. His charms are lost on her, for some reason. But when Adam storms into Rebekah’s yoga class and demands that her boss give her a massive raise, she grabs him and smooches him. In the next scene, they’re losing clothes hurriedly in an apartment and falling into bed for a passionate bout of lovemaking. (We don’t see anything critical.) They talk in bed after another roll in the hay later in the episode.
Adam nearly goes to an important meeting shirtless (before he’s reminded out his state of undress) and, as mentioned, smokes a marijuana bong before getting out of bed. We see him smoke weed much earlier in the chronology, too, and Rebekah literally sniffs him out as a chain smoker. He and other characters drink. A selling point for his communal workspaces is the open bar, and where he imagines that people from different work teams can drink and share ideas. (He tells one potential lessee that perhaps he can forge friendships and partnerships with other lessees over “beer pong.”) Elsewhere, Adam tells Rebekah that her job is teaching older women how to contort enough to smell their anuses.
Rebekah seems to be a big believer in Eastern spirituality and/or New Age philosophy. She teaches yoga and tells Adam that if he puts “positive vibes” in the world, those vibes will radiate back to him. (After he receives a call that seems to confirm that, Adam calls her a “sorceress.”) Adam is Jewish, and he mentions his time in a Jewish commune called a kibbutz. (Miguel was also raised in a commune, and he talks about having several mothers—all of who breastfed him.) A potential investor wears a Jewish kippah.
Characters use the f-word five times and the s-word another 13 times. We also hear “a–” and three misuses of God’s name.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Shape Island may charm little viewers and won’t bend their parents out of shape. But the show can also feel surprisingly flat.
Max’s newest release, Task, takes audiences to task with a slow-burn storyline involving graphic violence, nudity and crude language.
It’s fun, but the show is guilty of lack of restraint in the second degree—a senseless crime if ever there was one.
Based on novel by Jenny Han, this series follows the complex love life of Belly, a young girl caught between two boys who are childhood friends as she joins the world of debutantes.
