One of the side effects of watching a recent history true-scam show like Super Pumped, the high-octane, wearisome Showtime anthology series whose first season tracks the rise and fall of Uber’s disgraced CEO, Travis Kalanick, is to wonder in every scene: did this really happen? Or, in the case of Super Pumped specifically: is this dialogue heavily embellished or do tech CEOs flying too close to the sun on a jetstream of cash just sound this deranged?
Kalanick, played with gusto by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is a ball of jumpy, narcissistic energy who speaks in comically grandiose terms. “We fuck the status quo, alright?” he says to his staff. He spins a cease and desist order from the city of San Francisco as “VALIDATION OF OUR STATUS OF DISRUPTORS”, in a shouted speech to the whole office. He draws a huge smiley face on the order with red Sharpie, because “WE ARE IN THE WORLD-CHANGING BUSINESS!”
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, from Billions co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien and based on the book of the same name by New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac, resembles that gleeful, Sharpied kiss-off. The eight-part series paints a stark portrait of Silicon Valley greed, carelessness and win-at-all-costs betrayals with winking, ambitious flourishes – baroque gamesmanship, ample profanity, fourth-wall breaking, gonzo explainers (the whole palette borrows heavily from Adam McKay’s the Big Short). Quentin Tarantino serves as a discordant, sparsely used narrator. Venture capitalists mull over pitches with anvil-heavy lines like “a unicorn will take flight in this sector”. But the confident style feels, as the show draws on, paper thin, adding little to what is already known about people who would do anything for profit.
Super Pumped loosely traces the genuinely wild rise of Uber, founded in 2009 by Garrett Camp (Jon Bass) and Kalanick, but its real emotional arc, so much as one exists, is Kalanick’s tempestuous relationship with investor/mentor Bill Gurley, played with a laconic Texas drawl by everyman actor Kyle Chandler (think Coach Taylor, but a billionaire). Gurley meets Kalanick as he’s still licking his wounds from a past start-up failure, leaning heavily on his mom Bonnie (Elisabeth Shue, too young for the role) and starter girlfriend Angie (Annie Chang).
Gurley is skeptical of Kalanick’s bombast (in one the show’s more effective flourishes, enactments of Kalanick’s embellishments fade to green screen, then a recounting of the the unflattering, mundane truth.) But he’s sold on Uber’s potential, thus funding an accelerating merry-go-round of aggressive growth, scandal, weaseling out of said scandal, repeat.
In the five episodes available for review, Super Pumped rifles through Uber’s many PR debacles: the “boob-er” comment, the undisclosed spying on drivers, the dubious finances; the time senior executive Emil Michael (Babak Tafti) floated the idea of surveilling critical journalists; Uber’s toxic culture of sexism and sexual harassment exposed by Susan Fowler’s (Eva Victor) viral 2017 blog post and subsequent memoir, Whistleblower, relayed in fourth wall-breaking narrative. Same for the video of a belligerent Kalanick arguing with Uber driver Fawzi Kamel (Mousa Hussein Kraish, one of the only drivers depicted in the series) in 2017.
It’s a quirk of timing that Super Pumped premieres within the same month as Netflix’s Inventing Anna, on “Soho grifter” Anna Delvey; Apple’s WeCrashed, on the rise and fall of WeWork; and Hulu’s The Dropout, on Theranos and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. All four series tackle highly publicized scandals of the mid-2010s that fall somewhere on the continuum of ruthless capitalism to full-scale scam. The appeal of all of these headline-to-screen shows is the chance to see known facts glossed and dramatized with celebrities, to have insight into the whims of the ultra-rich, and to enter the board rooms we otherwise would not have access to.
On that count, Super Pumped mostly delivers. The episodes are stuffed with the bread and butter of building a Silicon Valley unicorn, compulsively rendered in the language of war to the point of redundancy: battles (competition) and armies (drivers) and weapons (illegal surveillance); deals made, rejected, or outright sabotaged by Kalanick’s egomaniacal whims. As Uber grows and disrupts, it courts ever stronger enemies: taxi and livery groups, transportation departments, international governments and a who’s who of real-life Silicon Valley figures played for no more than name recognition, with the unfortunate exception of Uber board member Arianna Huffington (Uma Thurman, a cringey caricature of the HuffPost founder.)
At its best, Super Pumped pokes at the dubious ethics of Silicon Valley – even the guys ostensibly trying to do the right thing, such as Gurley’s determination to allow drivers to collect tips, are ultimately focused on the bottom line. But it’s a discordant, tiring watch. The show’s imitation of the “no bullshit” obscenity of bro-y Silicon Valley, in both language and style (boardroom dynamics rendered as a video game smackdown, for example) wears to the point of parody, and begins to undermine its critique. The same dynamic plays on repeat: Kalanick is aggressive and uncompromising; Gurley tries to rein him in; Kalanick mostly wins, somehow; the drivers, mostly offscreen with the exception of Kamel, lose.
Presumably, the end of the season will depict Kalanick’s 2017 ouster in a board coup led by Gurley. The road to that breakdown will likely prompt many a google search, but as a series of recreations, Super Pumped buys into the same view of business as Uber: a game to be won or lost, with a trail of destruction in its wake.
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber starts on Showtime on 27 February with a UK date to be announced
