Hulu's The Dropout gets the scam show right

Vulture

Scam shows are all the rage these days, from Inventing Anna to WeCrashed to Super Pumped. But with those shows, says Kathryn VanArendonk, "too often, it feels like we’re being insufficiently scammed. It turns out that what I want in a scam show is The Dropout, Hulu’s new series about Elizabeth Holmes, creator of the blood-testing company Theranos. None of it would work without the lead performance by Amanda Seyfried, who somehow conveys all of Holmes’s eccentricities and tics without begging for laughs or denying their absurdity. Her Holmes has elements of impersonation, but it’s much more an interpretation of the person and her motivations. She is someone who desperately wants success and can’t interrogate that within herself, someone who lacks empathy on the individual level but imagines things on a grand scale of sweeping social improvement, and someone who feels she can be comfortable in the world only if she remakes the world to fit herself. A key ingredient in the recipe for any scam show is a central figure who has galvanized people’s attention and put on such a successful demonstration of competence that everyone has given them money. But a great scam show needs an element of portraiture to illuminate that principal scammer. If they’re just monsters, or if they’re given flashbacks to backfill motivation and shore up their current predicament, it all fits together too neatly. (There is no more boring form of character development than a straight, bold line drawn from one childhood event to an adult personality.) The Dropout succeeds because of Seyfried’s work as Holmes, but it’s also a messier portrait of Holmes’s youth, one that leads to a much more nuanced and multifaceted image of her by the time Theranos is in full swing."

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• The Dropout makes an unconvincing case for Elizabeth Holmes' humanity: "Though The Dropout’s dramatization of past events pulls heavily from the podcast’s reporting, the show is far more comfortable editorializing with a story that somewhat sympathetically frames Holmes not simply as a visionary-turned-fraudster, but also as a woman navigating the treacherous and broadly sexist world of multimillion-dollar tech startups," says Charles Pulliam-Moore, adding: "Though each of The Dropout’s big plot points is based in reality, because the show weaves them all together into a singular narrative, it can read as the continued mythologization of Holmes — here set to a soundtrack of early-aughts hits like Passion Pit’s 'Sleepyhead' and Feist’s '1234.'"
• The Dropout is a smidge too sympathetic to Holmes: "It’s kind of a cliché to complain about a docudrama being overly sympathetic toward its notorious criminal protagonist," says Gavia Baker-Whitelaw. "But, well… The Dropout is a smidge too friendly to Elizabeth Holmes, emphasizing her fictionalized vulnerabilities before charting her scandalous fall from grace. The story of Theranos has already been exhaustively documented in nonfiction media, leaving this show with one specific task: Dramatizing Elizabeth Holmes’ inner life, based mostly on speculation."
• While Seyfried's performance is appealing, there’s a tidiness to the early episodes that flattens the peculiarities of Elizabeth’s journey: "The cultivation of her early patents are glossed over with brief conversations about the 'beauty' of microfluidics and long, meaningful stares at the tip of her finger," says Randall Coburn. "More time is devoted to exploring her relationship with Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews, sporting a pronounced paunch), an aimless, much older tech millionaire with whom she develops a romantic relationship. Seyfried and Andrews have chemistry, but there’s a familiarity to the scenes of their courtship, a lack of danger, that fails to capture the truly odd vibes of their union. That same sense of familiarity extends to her hapless early meetings with venture capitalists. Elizabeth’s story is one of a kind, yet these scenes feel redolent of other biopics."
• The Dropout often uses comedy as a crutch, aiming way too often for that Pam & Tommy tone of needle-drop hysteria: "Everyone seems encouraged to go big. Macy looks and acts like a cartoon," says Darren Franich. "I'm not sure watching Elizabeth Holmes dance by herself to pop music really adds to our understanding of her motivations. Her relationship with Sunny is a matter of courtroom ambiguity at this point, though I do think Andrews may just be too dashing to really nail the onscreen character's descent into Orwellian creep." He adds: "It takes three hours to get to the juiciest phase of Holmes' vampiric con job. Things really start to move in episode 7, which must be the worst thing you can read in a TV review. Seyfried has to play Holmes from teenage ambition through young adult fame and thirtysomething disgrace. It's the lamest structure of soup-to-nuts storytelling, just one damn thing after another, with precious little insight into its confounding central character."
• The Dropout offers conflicting views of Elizabeth Holmes: "The Dropout, Hulu’s latest contribution to the streaming world’s current glut of limited series about doomed startups and con artists (see also: Netflix’s Inventing Anna, Showtime’s Super Pumped, et al.), falls prey to many of this nascent subgenre’s failings," says Clint Worthington. "It’s too long and convoluted by half, and sometimes drops a couple of balls when juggling its oversized ensemble cast. But one thing that show creator Elizabeth Meriwether (New Girl) and director of the first four episodes, Michael Showalter (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), understand about Holmes’ story is that it’s innately ridiculous that people fell for her schtick in the first place. And when The Dropout becomes more interested in Holmes as an antagonist in America’s story than the protagonist of her own, the miniseries shines a little bit brighter." Worthington adds: "Frustratingly, a lot of The Dropout can’t match Seyfried’s hell-for-leather frequency, chiefly due to how much they have to stretch out events to fit the show’s eight-hour runtime."
• The Dropout excels most in unpacking the gendered fascination with Elizabeth: "The show transports us back to a time when the sight of an ultrasuccessful young female founder really was striking, especially for fellow women in tech, while illustrating its protagonist’s studied transformation into the Holmes we know today: she of the red lipstick, austere wardrobe and fake deep voice," says Inkoo Kang. "(Somewhat deglammed, Seyfried, in perhaps her best performance to date, is more notable here for the intensity she brings to her character, as well as her excellence in portraying Elizabeth in a wide range of ages.) Meriwether and her writers don’t bring new insight into the dynamics that allowed the real-life Holmes to put her older male benefactors at ease by occupying a type of femininity that’s beguiling yet nonthreatening. But it’s worth considering anew all the effort and inspiration that went into her gradual makeover, especially since no preexisting template existed for her in Palo Alto — or at least none she was interested in emulating."
• Unlike Inventing Anna, The Dropout plays it straight: "Possibly too straight – there are times when a little levity as the impossibilities mount would not go amiss – but all in the service of a story that blows your mind quite as comprehensively as Sorokin’s," says Lucy Mangan, adding: "The Dropout is a lumbering beast, but saved by two things. The first is that it is simply such a good a story that you would have to deal it actual hammer blows to kill its fascination. Because – I’m sorry, did I not say? Tiny detail, often slipped the inventor’s mind, too – the technology did not work. Not properly. It worked a few times in a small way, just enough to give hope to those involved but, crucially, not on the day they showed it to investors. Holmes faked the results it apparently spewed out in front of them. From there, there was no going back. Its second savior is the solid cast, led by Amanda Seyfried as Holmes."
• Fortunately, Seyfried doesn't focus on mimicry, but on evoking Holmes' distinctive speaking style: "What does she do about the voice? That's the first question, right?" says Linda Holmes, adding: "For a lot of viewers, the first question will be what Seyfried will do about Holmes' notoriously low voice, which has been the subject of much speculation about its authenticity, its purpose (if it is intentional rather than natural), and the role of gender policing in how it's received and talked about. Fortunately, Seyfried doesn't focus on mimicry, but on evoking Holmes' distinctive speaking style. It's less important that she hit the low tone than it is that she capture the way Elizabeth Holmes speaks — charismatic in its way, yes, but also kind of ... dorky? Seyfried gets it just right in the trailer around the :45 mark when she talks to a professor of hers (played by a wonderfully dry Laurie Metcalf) about what she wants to do. If you've watched the other Theranos material and listened to Elizabeth Holmes talk a lot, you will recognize her boundless but awkward confidence in Seyfried's delivery."
• The subtlety of The Dropout’s position on Holmes is not matched by the subtlety of the show in any other department: "It has all the smoothed down edges of an iMac, or an Edison machine," says Nick Hilton, adding: "The final product is, ultimately, more viable than anything Theranos ever produced. Anchored by Seyfried’s charmingly vulnerable central performance, and assisted by the comedy chops of executive producers like New Girl’s Elizabeth Meriwether and Search Party’s Michael Showalter, at its best it feels like The Wolf of Wall Street, if Jordan Belfort were replaced by Paris Geller. But all too often the temptation for foreshadowing, blunt symbolism, or the skewering of LinkedIn babble, gets in the way of this being an effective human drama."
• The Dropout does an excellent job of unpacking how Holmes slipped into con artistry, step by step, and how she managed to fool so many people for so long: "Meriwether is best known for creating the Fox sitcom New Girl, which at first might seem an odd match for a ripped-from-the-headlines account like this," says Alan Sepinwall. "But throughout, it’s not hard to view The Dropout as a tale of adorkability’s dark side." He adds: "It’s a maddening, gripping, and at times startlingly funny recreation of a story that would feel too absurd to be true if we didn’t already know otherwise."
• Unlike Inventing Anna, The Dropout knows how to depict journalism: "In another comparison to Inventing Anna, the journalistic portion of the story doesn’t feel shoehorned into the plot at all," says Kathryn Porter. "The Wall Street Journal’s investigation of Theranos comes around at a very natural point in the story, and because it takes place during the rise of Theranos instead of retrospectively, it feels like something that truly belongs there. Characters that start off as minor players are allowed to grow with the addition of The Wall Street Journal’s involvement, and any show that is able to develop even the smallest stories in an interesting way in such a short time deserves to be applauded for it. In the end, The Dropout does an excellent job of depicting a train that deserved to get derailed. Elizabeth Holmes is painted as a textbook example of why simply having an idea is not a good justification for dropping out of a prestigious institution of higher education, and Hulu’s portrayal of her girlbossing too close to the sun is captivating through and through. In the age of the scammer show, The Dropout is certainly worth being played."
• The thing that The Dropout does best is capture a sense of human scale: "It’s the people who were part of the trickery, primarily Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), Holmes’ boyfriend and eventual Theranos COO," says Daniel Fienberg. "It’s the people who were trapped in the deception, various researchers and engineers and board members who bought into what they thought was Holmes’ vision — folks like Stanford professor Channing Robertson (Bill Irwin), her former college TA Rakesh (Utkarsh Ambudkar), a slew of Walgreens executives (played by Josh Pais and Alan Ruck primarily) and chemist Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry). And then there were the people who, for a variety of reasons, tried to sound alarms and bring her down, from entrepreneur Richarch Fuisz (William H. Macy) to Stanford professor Phyllis Gardner (Laurie Metcalf). Much more than most depictions of vast conspiracies, The Dropout nails the 'vastness,' illustrating how a charismatic leader, even one as magnificently awkward as Holmes, could make people buy their snake oil and ignore increasingly unavoidable realities."
• How The Dropout's costume and makeup team transformed Amanda Seyfried into Elizabeth Holmes: Claire Parkinson, the show’s costume designer, first had to find a turtleneck matching Elizabeth Holmes'. She found a vintage Miyake turtleneck, the kind Holmes wore, and dupes from dozens of other brands. In the end, she went with a semi-synthetic number from Wolford. “It had the perfect stretchiness that she could play with,” says Parkinson, referring to the fiddling and finger-worrying that Seyfried performs throughout the series, her jaw flexed and eyes held wide. Jorjee Douglass, the makeup artist who reinterpreted Holmes’ clumpy mascara and cakey foundation, adds: "I’d make Amanda scrunch up her face when I was applying her makeup."
• William H. Macy wanted to look as close to Richard Fuisz as possible, spending hours with the hair and makeup team: “That bald cap was not easy to get on,” he says. “There’s new technology in the last couple of years, but it isn’t flawless… They used to be made of rubber. Now they are made of a silicone gel sort of thing, so it moves. And there’s new solvents so it dissolves the bald cap into your skin so it makes no line. It’s just great.”
• Naveen Andrews saw Sunny Balwani as Lady Macbeth: "I was aware of intermittent bursts in the media when the story broke," he says. "But I have to say, I wasn’t particularly interested because it seemed to have to do — out of ignorance — with business and corporations and startups and entrepreneurs. And that wasn’t terribly interesting to me. It was only when I got the script that I realized, Oh, good God! There’s a lot more to this story than what’s been presented. It seemed to have Shakespearean dimensions to me. I mean, I thought of Macbeth, to be honest...Sunny is Lady Macbeth! Because the fact is, they had started at the outset, it seemed, with good intentions. And how you can then move from those good intentions — because of acquiring great power, wealth — into uncharted territory."
• Andrews says The Dropout's script evolved because of Holmes' trial: “When, I think, texts were released into the public domain as the trial was progressing, the writing would change,” he says. “Which turned out to be a good thing. Because Amanda and I, very early on when we first started, probably day one, made a decision about what kind of relationship we believed it to be in terms of the level of intimacy and the depth of it. You know, how into each other they were. And in terms of what happened later on, with what was revealed in those texts, maybe we were in the right ballpark.” 
• Andrews on trying to physically look like Sunny Balwani: "Both Amanda and I wanted to physically resemble our characters, which we felt was important," he says. "For me, gaining 25 pounds and using prosthetics because I am a slip of a thing. And then what’s interesting about that is what that does to you as an actor — how you move. There was a certain kind of rigidity or tension to him, which I felt was apparent, even when you see him supposedly relaxing. There’s always tension there. That gives you tremendous freedom. It’s quite liberating as an actor."
• Did Amanda Seyfried learn anything that surprised her?: "I came in with all this compassion and a desperation for understanding what she might have been feeling in certain situations," she says. "And then after a while, I felt, like, She must have been so tired. I'm just tired for her. I'll tell you one thing I did learn about myself is that I learned how important boundaries are more than anything. I'm just such an open book for really anybody who wants to know, (but) I do not owe anybody my truth. What I've seen of her is that she walked the opposite way, where she shared what she wanted to share and she kept private what she wanted to keep private. And that was something that I wanted for myself. And now in playing her and talking about my experience, my process with the show is that I'm learning boundaries that I didn't think I had and that I find are necessary in order to keep a little for myself. And I think it was a big lesson for me, especially as a mom and someone who's got other priorities now. It really made it very, very clear to me what I needed to do for myself and my life."
• The Dropout creator Liz Meriwether says it's okay to laugh, even if the show isn't a comedy: "Yes, it's okay to laugh! There's some funny moments," she says, adding: "I certainly wasn't wanting to make fun of her or make fun of other people in the show. I just wanted to embrace the sort of awkwardness and the absurdity of her world."
• Meriwether found similarities between her and Holmes: “I felt a lot of the similarities in my life with her,” she says. “We’re similar in age, we have the same name, and just that experience of being young and female in a position of power quickly.” Meriwether also found a connection based on her experience launching New Girl on Fox: “I felt like I could make sense of choices she made up to a certain point,” Meriwether says. “The idea of being a young woman in power without many role models of other women in power and sort of flailing with that, it felt like something I hadn’t really seen on television before. So that part of the story is something I feel uniquely able to tell just based on my experiences. ... That kind of scared me a little bit. And that made me want to tell this.”
• Meriwether wanted to strike a balance between drama and satire: “It felt like if I chose to make it just comedic, I think that would really do a disservice to the seriousness of what happened and the people that were affected,” she says. “And then similarly, I think if it were just super dark and dramatic the whole time, (it wouldn’t be) the best representation of this absurd world that she was in.”
• Meriwether was interested in the absurdities of Silicon Valley: "Honestly, it’s been amazing to be able to do something that isn’t a comedy," she says. "But coming from comedy, I was very interested in the absurdities of the world. Because as I learned more about Silicon Valley, and how everything works, it can be an absurd place. And the performance aspect of her character — the turtleneck and the voice  — as somebody who has been in rooms with all men and not knowing what to do with my hands or my face, I understood that." She adds: "There are a lot of layers and facets and history. I felt like people’s understanding of who she was had been limited to the deep voice and the turtleneck. I was interested in going deeper, and I felt like Rebecca (Jarvis’) podcast was made with that spirit of wanting to figure out what motivated her. It was a really hard tone to figure out. As opposed to other stories of start-ups that have failed, the stakes for this were so high. This was people’s health. This was, in a very primal way, their blood."