TV REViEW

from City Pages | Moving out | 092321

THE BUZZ

Startup is a wild, messy ride through Miami’s tech scene

Startup | ree seasons | Net ix

I’ve always enjoyed the actor Martin

Freeman, in both works you’ve likely heard of, and works you quite possibly haven’t. Everyone knows his role in Th e Hobbit; and you might know his role in the original British version of Th e Offi ce as Tim. You probably enjoyed his run in the second season of Fargo (the TV series of course). And bonus points if you saw him in the British show Hardware. (It’s hilarious and you can fi nd it free on YouTube, BTW).

But Freeman’s character in Startup, a show about three very diff erent would-be tech entrepreneurs who attempt to found a cryptocurrency, is quite diff erent.

And to be clear, Freeman isn’t one of the tech entrepreneurs; instead he’s a shady FBI agent. Izzy Morales (Otmara Marrero) is a genius coder in Miami whose life is otherwise a mess. She developed the code behind GenCoin, which she bills as the future of payments. She’s quickly joined by Nick Talman (Adam Brody), an unhappy banker whose life is kind of a mess, and Ronald Dacey (Edi Gathegi), who helps run a gang in Little Haiti but dreams of a way out.

Th e three form an unlikely partnership. Talman’s dad launders money for drug dealers and he ends up investing his dad’s money he’s entrusted with into GenCoin; and Dacey originally meets the two to get his drug money back, but changes his mind and wants to be a partner because he envisions a better life for his family and for Little Haiti.

So basically everyone’s life is messed up here. And it’s about to get worse. Along the way, they contend with shark investors, genius hackers and then, of course, Freeman himself. Freeman is a corrupt FBI agent who becomes tangled up in GenCoin because of his ties to Talman’s father, who Freeman blackmailed into getting a big cut of his latest drug deal. Th at’s the same money, by the way, that Talman invested into GenCoin.

Are we getting the impression this is one crazy ride of a show? If Mayor Francis Suarez’s vision of Miami is a tech and crypto-friendly haven for startup culture, Startup is the underbelly of that culture. It’s tech fortunes built on the back of corrupt developers and drug cartels, all with the FBI playing along with it and taking its own cut.

At one point, Freeman leads a new FBI recruit up to one of Miami’s rooftops and lays out the corruption map for her. Everywhere he points, he explains how the landscape was built through various methods of corruption. She has no idea he’s one of the most corrupt of all of them.

Th ere are three seasons, and I’ve only watched one so far, but Freeman and the GenCoin three are becoming further entangled. Th eir situation sounds like a hot mess that gets perpetually messier, but one thing is for certain: it’s hard to look away.