From The Social Network and TVF Pitchers to BlackBerry, why modern storytellers can't get enough of start-up stories

Based on the story of Research in Motion, 'BlackBerry' is set to release in theatres this year. (Image: Screen grab/YouTube/IFC Films)

In a scene from Apple TV’s WeCrashed, Adam Neumann, played by the goggle-eyed Jared Leto, tells his business partner, rather cockily: “Every great business story has an all-nighter.” Leto makes a meta-reference here to the popular storytelling trope of tasking start-up nerds and founders with burning the midnight oil. Almost every fictional series or film about a start-up you might have seen recently, will at some point have featured a night when the protagonists band together, eat, drink, bang heads and come out the other side looking like messy, but determined geniuses. It’s a sure-shot way to establish both earnestness and a degree of compassion, elements required to somewhat balance the scales against the wider perception of capitalism. It’s also a trope that exemplifies why start-up enterprises, and corporate culture in general has become fertile ground for modern storytelling.

WeCrashed, as the name suggests, traces the unprecedented rise and fall of WeWork, founded by Adam, whose soft-spoken assertiveness is a thing of wonder in itself. The series isn’t quite sure what to make of Neumann: frame him as the eccentric genius or a semi-alert con artist, but it’s the ambiguousness that makes the show fascinating. Leto is exceptional, as the heavily accented Israeli-American who speaks with the confidence of a Greek philosopher while actually looking like one. Adam is blindly assisted in his conquest by Rebekah, played convincingly by Anne Hathaway, in a series that captures the complexity and unhinged adrenaline of running a new business. “Who would give a company without assets, sales, employees or even a name, money?”, Adam’s colleague asks, dumbfounded at one point. Turns out, many would and did.

WeCrashed is symbolic of a peculiar cultural shift. Once considered the burial ground of creativity and woke idealism, the unfancied cubicle has suddenly become the setting of some of the most prescient storytelling happening today. Only last year Showtime launched the anthology series SuperPumped (Voot Select; based on the book by Mike Isaac), the first season of which essayed the rise and fall of Travis Kalanick (founder of Uber), played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The second season will focus on Facebook. Which circles us back to the starting point of this fandom for media and tech companies. David Fincher’s Oscar-nominated The Social Network can be credited with offering a biblical first-sighting of just how thrilling and satisfying a story about the creation of a website could look.

Storytelling in this space hasn’t just restricted itself to doubling down on the scandalous nature of the start-up beast. HBO’s Silicon Valley, for example, injected comedy into the vein of the American entrepreneurship story that had begun to take itself far too seriously. The nerdy losers of the hit sitcom exposed the self-serious nature of tech czars, who had begun to oversell their influence and undersell their vulnerability as a matter of routine. Even Breaking Bad, you could argue, was a start-up story gone wrong, in principle.

Closer home, TVF Pitchers to an extent, accrued the reputation of a cult, by somewhat forecasting the frenzied media circus around start-ups, their eye-watering valuations and the dirt that gets kicked up in the process of both creating and berating them. This fascination has somewhat culminated in the popularity of Shark Tank India, the kind of experiential reality TV show that makes everyone, at least for that one hour, feel smarter than they might actually be.

There has been a larger focus on corporate culture in storytelling in general as well. HBO’s Industry, for example, takes an intimate look at graduates hedging their bets on the elite banking sector while Apple’s Severance, evokes the tropes of post-modern sci-fi to examine the drudgery and despicability of modern-day capitalism. Last but surely not the least, Succession - that show everyone’s egging to devour or be devoured by - focuses on the handover of a traditional media conglomerate.

Several factors have possibly coalesced to make start-up stories today more intriguing than their predecessors. For one, most start-ups are now fronted by outspoken founders who act as an extension of the brand. The visibility, evidentially, helps acquire intellectual, maybe even actual capital. Living by the sword of reputation, however, guarantees you might also die by it. Interestingly both the climb and the fall are equally enthralling to witness. In fact, one feels pointless without the other. There is a rude, salacious aspect to consuming both elation and suffering as content, but so is the bizarre, unruly circus of valuations and funding that seems to repeatedly feed on itself. It feels tragicomic, probably because it is.

Depravity is the root cause of all obsessions and that is probably why start-up stories that feature premature highs and spectacular lows make for the most fascinating stories. It’s sophisticated voyeurism at its best, the kind of stories that exude importance for just how outrageous or unlikely they seem. Gone are the days of watching clean, whitewashing underdog stories that simplified life. This is the age of theatricality born out of the ability to fall just as hard as you can climb. There is a natural thrill to that kind of extreme which means for every corporate disaster that we record or remember for the sake of entertainment, there are plenty others that are birthed, run and grown without similar antics or provocations. They, however, reek of austerity. For stories, we need greed, crime, fraud, evil geniuses or self-regarding buffoons. Might the Crypto bros be next?