WeCrashed, Super Pumped and The Dropout have a "workism" and "hustle culture" throughline

The Guardian

The "ethos of so-called 'hustle culture' – the idea that work is life and the self derives value through constant work – courses throughout a number of recent shows set across the 2010s," says Adrian Horton, adding that it is most overt on WeCrashed. "These shows, which all depict headlining stories of singularly deceitful, messianic people, have been loosely classified as true-con TV, 'bad entrepreneur TV' or modern grift series in the headline-to-TV pipeline," says Horton. "These are all fair descriptors – all four series, which premiered in the span of a month, evince our evergreen fascination with the art of the scam (see also: recent Netflix docu-series hits The Tinder Swindler and Bad Vegan). But they are also, in piecemeal fashion, building the iconography of a certain slice of millennial experience now barely discernible in rear-view. There are the deliberately dated nods to the late 2000s/early 2010s – the music (Katy Perry gets a name drop in both WeCrashed and The Dropout), the fashion, the fascination with (and mourning of) Steve Jobs. And there is an awkward, inchoate through-line of 'hustle culture' or 'workism' – the distinctly American, quasi-religious belief system among the college-educated elite (myself included) that work is not merely a job but an identity, an arbiter of self-worth, and a cause worth believing in. WeWork was not a company, Adam Neumann infamously said, but a movement."