"Super Pumped" effectively illustrates that while such personalities might not be great to live with (or even share a ride with), as movies or limited series go, they can be pretty fascinating to watch.
The first two episodes are fueled by sneers, bombast, hard rock and dialogue that tries a little too hard to replicate the “A million dollars isn’t cool. ... But then the supporting characters — starting with Travis’s first major investor, Bill Gurley (Kyle Chandler) — emerge, and “Super Pumped” becomes much more humane, coherent and watchable.
The series resists the urge to humanise Travis’s selfishness, but it also fails to extrapolate what super pumped guys like Travis mean for Silicon Valley and the rest of us. The result is low-calorie entertainment of the highest order, as flashy and empty as Travis’s self-serving rallying cry.
Super Pumped makes the case that figures like Kalanick pride themselves on pushing boundaries so much that they decide boundaries don’t need to exist. And that’s interesting to explore, up to a point. But exploring that flawed, morally unmoored worldview also results in regurgitating messages that TV shows and movies about the business world have been telegraphing for decades.
Fueled by anger more than insights, it doesn’t seem built to provide a fresh spin on greed and power in the 21st century, or how Kalanick’s quest mirrors technology giants’ invasive, self-serving business practices. Those elements are there, but they’re sped by in favor of chronicling events already recounted elsewhere.
Whatever massaging has gone into coherently dramatizing this story never feels like enough. Travis often goes on about how the Uber app is meant to be a “frictionless” experience, but this misshapen series is anything but.