TIME OFF OPENER
△
Travis (Gordon-
Levitt) fires up
Uber’s “super
pumped” staffT
here is a scene in showtime’s new docu-
drama Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber where
irascible Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick is try-
ing to talk Mark Cuban into investing in his soon-
to-be-notorious startup. It’s 2010, a year before the app’s
public launch, and the Dallas Mavericks owner is skeptical.
“I am not gonna invest in a company where you have
to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to do tens of
millions of dollars in revenue,” Cuban tells the younger
entrepreneur, shutting down Kalanick’s hyperactive sales
pitch with his own no-nonsense, alpha-male energy.
Furious at the rejection, Kalanick warns his would-be
benefactor that if he turns down the opportunity to invest
in Uber now, he’ll never get another one. Cuban passes.
Some version of this exchange did take place during
Uber’s infancy; by 2014, Cuban was looking back on the
decision as “probably my biggest mistake in investing.” But
it’s hard to tell just how true the scene is to what actually
happened. In a casting choice that’s refective of Super
Pumped’s metafictional style, Kalanick, like most of the
characters, is portrayed by an actor—Joseph Gordon- Levitt,
going all-out in every take—while Cuban appears as himself.
Such blurring of fact and fiction is endemic on TV these
days, thanks to a spike in the production of docudramas,
many of which center on larger-than-life news makers.
Along with Super Pumped (premiering Feb. 27), 2022 has
already brought ABC’s civil rights drama Women of the
Movement, Hulu’s sex-tape saga Pam & Tommy, and Shonda
Rhimes’ Netfix miniseries on the rise and fall of “Soho
Grifter” Anna Delvey, Inventing Anna. Hulu is getting ready
to unveil its Elizabeth Holmes portrait The Dropout on the
same day, March 3, that Peacock drops Tiger King retelling
Joe vs. Carole. Before the spring is out, we’ll also have docu-
dramas on WeWork (Apple’s WeCrashed), the ’80s Lakers
(HBO’s Winning Time), killer Pam Hupp (NBC’s The Thing
About Pam), Michelle Carter’s texting-suicide case (Hulu’s
The Girl From Plainville), Watergate (Starz’s Gaslit), and the
making of The Godfather (The Offer on Paramount+).
As tends to be the case in the current, streaming- driven
era of rampant programming overlap that I’ve been calling
peak redundancy, there are too many of these shows,
covering too many of the same subjects: tech, scammers,
crime, sexual politics. With effects-heavy franchises starting
to crowd out realism on the small screen, as they’ve already
done in movies, docudrama has become the genre of choice
for platforms looking to combine the character-driven
story telling of prestige TV with enough brand recognition
to guarantee an audience. It’s a shrewd choice, financially.
Creatively, however, the returns are already diminishing.
And at a time when misinformation keeps sowing confusion
over what is fact and what is fiction, the prevalence of
docudramas threatens to further muddy the distinction.
The proToTypical TV docudrama is a salacious,
slapdash affair—a ’90s Lifetime movie, maybe, about
a famous woman’s scandalous life. Ryan Murphy’s FX
anthology American Crime Story renovated that down-
market model in 2016, with a debut season adapted from
Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life:
The People v. O.J. Simpson. While its
subject was as crass as anything a cable
channel might rip from the headlines,
the show telegraphed prestige. Name
actors Cuba Gooding Jr. (as Simpson),
Sterling K. Brown, Sarah Paulson,
John Travolta, Courtney B. Vance,
and Nathan Lane anchored the cast.
Instead of simply re-creating the
media maelstrom that surrounded the
O.J. trial, ACS re-examined it, applying
progressive analyses of gender, race,
and tabloid culture to maligned figures
like Marcia Clark and Christopher
Darden. A ratings smash, the season
also won nine Emmys, including Best
Limited Series and awards for Brown,
Paulson, and Vance.
Since then, Murphy has embraced
the docudrama, in ACS and beyond,
amending our cultural hindsight on
notorious names from Monica Lewin-
sky to Halston. For almost all of these
projects, the megaproducer continued
to stunt-cast top actors, lean heavily
on a nonfiction book for source mate-
rial, and filter the past through a re-
visionist lens. This formula—which
arrived on time for an industry-wide
shift toward the miniseries, an ideal
format for true stories with definedTHIS SPREAD: SHOWTIME; PREVIOUS SPREAD SOURCE PHOTOS: OJ SIMPSON: EVERETT COLLECTION;
THE CROWN: NETFLIX (4); PAM & TOMMY: HULU (2); THE DROPOUT: BETH DUBBER—HULU;
INVENTING ANNA: NICOLE RIVELLI—NETFLIX
Time Off is reported by Simmone Shah