Showtime's Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber is the "tech bro" of anthology series

San Francisco Chronicle

"It should be clear that a film or TV series needn’t focus on a person with redeeming social qualities, especially in this late stage of antihero programming," says Chris Vognar of the Showtime anthology series from Billions co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien and executive producer Beth Schacter. "After all, Tony Soprano never won any citizenship awards. But if you don’t have any heft, or at least a touch of critical distance in the story, you run the risk of it taking on the personality of your subject. That can be a problem, especially if the show’s focal point is a shallow, ostentatious lout. Such is the malady of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, the new Showtime saga about Uber co-founder and Silicon Valley bad boy Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Loud, flashy and garish, Super Pumped — an anthology series that focuses on a different business disrupter each season (Facebook is set to pick up the torch for season two) — is the TV equivalent of a tech bro. Watching it is like attending a business meeting that refuses to end, attended by self-styled junior masters of the universe who won’t shut up."

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• Super Pumped's main problem is it's too predictable: "In Travis Kalanick’s mind, only a true a**hole possesses the ruthlessness required to build a successful business, which is exactly the kind of attitude you’d expect an arrogant self-proclaimed disruptor like Travis Kalanick to have," says Jen Chaney. "That’s part of the problem with this intermittently compelling, uneven season, part one of a planned anthology series that will focus on culturally significant corporate sagas. (Season two is set to tackle the relationship between Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.) While the Uber narrative, based here on the book Super Pumped by New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac, is certainly dramatic, twisty, and friction-filled, it never feels fully surprising as a piece of television. That may be because as an audience, we already know the details, or at least the broad strokes, of what happened in the early days of this company that flouted rules, regulations, and privacy protections in order to raise its profile and revenue. But even those unfamiliar with that history may sense where the season is going based on the familiar notes Super Pumped strikes."
• Super Pumped can’t figure out what it’s about: "Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Showtime’s limited series about Travis Kalanick’s period as CEO of the rideshare company, runs on a simple either-or proposition," says Daniel D'Addario. "Kalanick focused all of his energies on the success of the corporation he ran, at the expense of his employees’ well-being and physical safety, as well as of ethics, labor practices and the law. This made him either a terrible boss or — as he sees it — the optimal one. That this question is so easily answered accounts for why Super Pumped is such a punishing watch."
• Too much of Super Pumped is focused on Travis Kalanick: "If Super Pumped doesn’t exactly sing Travis’ praises, it does lavish him with attention — so much of it, it seems to have little left for anyone or anything else," says Angie Han. "The larger culture of tech worship that Uber came up in goes largely unexplored, so that it’s hard to tell if Uber and Kalanick are the aberration, or if basically nice and normal-seeming Lyft founder John Zimmer (John Magaro) is. Travis’ is the only psychology the series seems eager to delve into; nearly everyone else is merely an accessory, obstacle or witness to the Travis Kalanick story."
• Travis Kalanick is too much of an a**hole to spend this much time with: "Antiheroes need something to lose, and the audience needs to dread that loss," says Ben Travers. "Tony Soprano loses the battle for his soul. Walter White loses the family he set out to protect. Travis Kalanick loses… his company? His soul is never up for grabs because we’re never shown he has one. His family is tossed aside without a second thought. The ride is entertaining, but the driver is only one thing. And that one thing is an a**hole."
• Super Pumped is slick, cool, darkly funny and somewhat superficial: "With jazzy graphics punctuating certain plot points, the characters dropping pop-culture references everywhere and Quentin Tarantino providing the occasional voice-over narration, Super Pumped moves at a breezy pace (I’ve seen five of the seven episodes) and follows a steady pattern in each episode," says Richard Roeper. "Travis steamrolls through business meetings, conventions, one-on-ones, company brainstorming sessions and life in general in his trademark scorched-Earth fashion, moving forward like a shark and never taking responsibility for the consequences of his actions, while Bill does his best to make sure Uber is operating within the framework of the law and the boundaries of decent behavior."
• The role of Travis Kalanick was made for Joseph Gordon-Levitt: "It gives him the kind of rich role he hasn’t had in a long time, and lets him play someone that allows the smarmy side, and the boyish," says Nick Allen. "He’s believable getting heated over the latest move behind his back, and yet he’s bendable enough as someone who would still take advice from his mother (Elisabeth Shue) while dealing with a multi-billion dollar company that has piles of image problems. And then there’s the smile he sometimes flashes, forced and awkward and a bit monstrous, his eyes cringing, pretending to be nice. It’s weird and kind of perfect each time he whips it out."
• 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," says Adrian Horton. "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."
• Super Pumped is imperfect, but it's mostly successful: "It's a fast-paced and entertaining story of an Icarus you can't wait to see fall," says Liam Mathews. "It's like a Silicon Valley version of The Wolf of Wall Street that keeps its subject at a distance so you never start to sympathize with him. The series keeps you from understanding Kalanick as a person, but you fully understand him as a symbol of greed and an industry run amok. And that's a more important thing to understand anyway."
• The Social Network looms over Super Pumped, which it is able to overcome: "Despite also having a complex ruthless man at its center, the anthology series succeeds when it moves away from David Fincher’s deadly serious tone and gets increasingly playful with form, leaning into the dark humor," says Leila Latif. "The voiceover by Quentin Tarantino, animation flourishes, unreliable narration, and fourth wall-breaking creep up slowly, at first employed infrequently enough to make things jarring and tonally messy. But when board meetings are framed by Street Fighter-style animation, it is delightfully silly, and reminds us that these men, for all their power, money, and influence, are in stunted adolescence."
• Super Pumped creators wanted to explore how tech CEOs have become supervillains: “The ability of these people to self-mythologize and to occupy a place in our society that gods used to occupy, is completely fascinating," co-creator David Levien says of the Silicon Valley elite. “We want to look not only at why culture affords them this position,” he adds, “but what they’ve done and are willing to do to attain and keep their positions.” Fellow showrunner Beth Schacter adds: “Disruption is often the soil that monsters grow in. And we wanted to make sure every episode built to that, so we weren’t just dropping people in like, ‘This guy’s a bad guy.’ You have to see the whole journey to understand it.”
• Did Joseph Gordon-Levitt find it exhausting playing an overly cocky villain?: "It’s definitely exhausting," he says. "It’s a lot of hard work. I was tired at the end of the day. But it’s also the kind of marathon I’m trained for, man. Like I’m good at this shit. (Laughs) Not to toot my own horn. But also the writing was really good and when the writing’s there it makes it pretty easy. It’s interesting you say villain because, in a way, I think that’s true. There are a lot of highly questionable decisions and behavior from Travis. To me, what’s more interesting is not an indictment of that one individual human being but rather an exploration of what’s the system? What’s the culture? What are the macro components in place that drive somebody to do this? Ultimately, this is the game that’s been set up for entrepreneurs in our country. Travis just played it really well."