[imagesource: Showtime]

We’ve got another story about an aspirational figure flying too close to the sun for all you schadenfreude fans out there.

Don’t worry, we’re all fascinated by the rise and fall of some of the most wildly successful people who have graced our planet.

Out of all these kinds of tales doing the rounds – call it a zeitgeist moment – this story is less about a money-mad con artist and more about a changemaker who was dedicated to his mission to a fault.

Showtime’s anthology series Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber follows the ride app’s former CEO, Travis Kalanick (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who has such blind faith that his success soon became his demise.

The eight-episode series gets us up close and personal with the business deals that changed the world and our lives forever, notes MovieWeb:

The trailer shows Kalanick, a visionary with a lot of ambition who’s willing to do whatever it takes to build his company. Doing whatever it takes means getting involved with some of the more prominent players in the financial market, such as The Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington (Uma Thurman.)

Huffington also would become the first female to join the famous app’s Board of Directors. The trailer gives us an inside look into how Kalanick went about getting funded and how he found Bill Gurley, who was the primary key to getting the funding he needed to start Uber.

The series also plots the sore points of Kalanick’s downfall, starting with how his inflated ego and constant “go as hard as possible” mode isolated him from the needs of the people who helped build Uber.

You can see moments of his dangerous self-belief playing out in the trailer:

Mike Isaac, The New York Times tech reporter who has been covering Uber since 2014, is also the author of the titular 2019 book that inspired the series.

Isaac once said Kalanick is like “Mark Zuckerberg meets a can of Axe Body Spray,” adding that he is a “complicated, nuanced, flawed person who fought like hell to bring this industry to light”.

Isaac was also one of the executive producers on Super Pumped, as well as the show’s resident researcher and fact-checker, per TIME, which gives us an idea of how close the series is to reality.

It’s not true that Kalanick started off every Uber job interview with the question, “Are you an a-hole?”. However, this addition to the series helps “foreshadow the pitfalls of Kalanick’s overly aggressive leadership style”.

The TIME article also covers other truths and untruths regarding Uber’s tool that secretly denied service to some riders, the strained relationship between Kalanick and Gurley, the loving relationship between Kalanick and Huffington, and that viral blog post that blew the lid on worker discrimination and sexual harassment at Uber.

Kalanick resigned as Uber’s CEO in 2017.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber premiered on Showtime on February 27.

[sources:movieweb&time]