A handful of months after the release of Dopesick and mere weeks after premiering Pam & Tommy, Hulu continues its quest to leave no American scandal un-dramatized with The Dropout, an eight-episode miniseries tracking the rise and eventual downfall of Elizabeth Holmes. At the age of 19, Holmes dropped out of Stanford University and used her unspent college tuition to launch Theranos, a technology company that promised to revolutionize the healthcare industry with a new type of portable blood-testing machine. According to Theranos, these machines could offer a wide range of quick diagnoses based on a single drop of blood from a simple finger prick. The only problem? The technology didn’t actually work.
That didn’t stop Holmes and her enablers from lying their way to a $10 billion valuation, bilking investors, putting patients at risk, and making Holmes a CEO superstar in the process. In January, she was convicted of four counts of fraud and is currently awaiting sentencing, which could top out at 20 years in prison. The Dropout, based on a 2019 ABC News podcast covering the whole debacle, stars Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, an awkward but focused young woman who lays out her life goals pretty early on in the show: “I don’t want to be President,” she says. “I want to be a billionaire.”
The series begins with re-enacted clips of Holmes’ 2017 legal deposition (which are scattered throughout the series) but soon jumps back to 2002, when the story starts in earnest. Staying in Beijing for a pre-college Mandarin language program, Holmes has a tough time making friends but strikes up a relationship with Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), a Pakistani man 19 years her senior who’s back in school working toward a Master’s degree after selling a company he founded for a small fortune. The two become friends, then lovers, and eventually business partners, with Sunny’s darker side becoming more and more apparent as the show goes on. Once back in the states, Holmes, who is obsessed with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and bright enough to persuade one of the professors at Stanford to become an early ally, soon trades in higher education for an ant-infested office where she begins charting her nascent company’s world-changing mission.
Seyfried does good work mimicking Holmes’ notably odd mannerisms, including an artificially deep voice that Holmes concocted to give herself a more authoritative presence. But showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether, who created one of the last decade’s better hang-out sitcoms in New Girl, and her team, which also includes director Michael Showalter (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), perhaps wisely don’t attempt to turn Holmes into a sympathetic figure. Sure, they offer a few suggestions for where Holmes’ initial inspirations and unrelenting drive might have come from – early scenes highlight her father’s breakdown after getting laid-off from Enron and both her and her mother’s distaste for long, blood-drawing needles – but The Dropout doesn’t show a ton of interest in doing a deep dive on Holmes’ psyche (which occasionally results in it feeling like Seyfried is playing less of a character and more of a vessel for corporate vapidness).
Instead, the series mostly treats Elizabeth like the eccentric central figure in a much larger tapestry, one which includes greedy venture capitalists, brilliant scientists eager to believe in her vision of a better world, healthcare CEOs looking to latch themselves onto the next big thing, and a small team of truth-seekers who, for one reason or another, want to expose Holmes and Balwani’s ever-growing mountain of lies. It’s a lot to cover, and the series (of which reviewers were given every episode save the finale) jams it all in by making massive – and sometimes jarring — multi-year time jumps from one episode to the next. It’s also fair to point out that the world of tech start-ups and the fat cats who invest in them isn’t necessarily as colorful as, say, Pam & Tommy’s universe of neon-lit rock clubs and low-rent porn sets. But Merriweather and the other writers are able to put enough of a focus on some of the more fascinating people who were in Theranos’ orbit to hold the viewer’s interest, even when the story itself is moving through time at a faster rate than it’s advancing the plot. (Those blood-testing machines just keep on not working, and Holmes just keeps on lying about it, from one episode to the next.)
The series’ most sympathetic figure ends up being Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry), an aging biochemist who beat cancer but was left with chronic foot pain caused by the treatment. Gibbons starts off as a true believer on Elizabeth’s team who hopes the tech they’re working on can save thousands of lives, but he slowly begins to realize his boss is putting her own reputation ahead of the company’s stated goals. Gibbons is one of several figures who were duped by Holmes’ grand vision and found their lives devastatingly disrupted by the Theranos scandal. Fry is excellent in The Dropout and gives perhaps the series’ most robust and soulful performance.
Other members of the show’s large cast don’t get material as meaty but still find ways to leave their mark on the proceedings. Alan Ruck (Succession) livens things up considerably when he arrives in the fourth episode as an eager-to-please, Katy Perry-quoting Walgreens exec who can’t wait to get into business with Holmes. Ebon Moss-Barchrach (The Punisher) and LisaGay Hamilton (The Practice) have a great rapport as a Wall Street Journal reporter and editor who team up for a story that could make or break their careers. Kurtwood Smith (That ‘70s Show) and Laurie Metcalf (The Conners) bring their considerable gravitas to small but flashy roles. And then there’s William H. Macy, sporting an early contender for most intentionally awful costuming wig of the year as he plays a cantankerous Holmes family friend who holds a grudge against Elizabeth for never coming to him for business advice.
The Dropout makes attempts at touching on some larger themes, including the extra challenges faced by women CEOs (along with the damage that can be caused when a successful one is revealed to be a con artist) and the pitfalls of an American system of capitalism that’s more concerned about potential windfalls than honest results. Holmes standing in line for the launch of the first iPhone is one of several scenes that show how corporations and their CEOs can inspire a cult-like devotion in this modern, tech-driven age. But The Dropout refuses to ever fully lock on to a clear mission statement of its own, instead dutifully plowing through the facts of the case — not entirely unlike the various articles, documentaries, and podcasts that have already covered the Theranos scandal.
Because of that, it’s ultimately worth asking: Is The Dropout even necessary? But this is 2022, where umpteen streaming services need to be steadily delivering content to their subscribers, so of course, a story this salacious and juicy was going to get the prestige miniseries treatment. And the good news is, even if it never develops into a more intriguing whole, The Dropout is made of up enough solid components — whether it’s the early trials and tribulations of the well-meaning lab workers or the corporate-thriller turn that the story eventually takes — that anyone watching should be able to find something that appeals to them.
Rating: B
The Dropout premieres with its first three episodes on March 3 exclusively on Hulu, with new episodes released weekly thereafter.