The Dropout makes you feel icky for feeling bad for Elizabeth Holmes

BuzzFeed News

In contrast to straight-laced documentaries, dramatizations of scam stories "get sticky," says Scaachi Koul. "A documentary allows for a layered exploration of a scam: what led to it, how it unfolded, and who knew but didn’t stop it. But a miniseries or movie about a scam usually forces the audience to side with the scammer, prioritizing personal motivation over systemic failures. Hulu’s eight-episode series about Theranos, The Dropout, is maybe the clearest example of this. Holmes (played deftly by Amanda Seyfried) is the plucky if flawed protagonist in the story of her own downfall. We follow her as she goes from precocious Stanford student to overwhelmed CEO who ignores the pleas of others when her blood-testing tech goes awry...what makes The Dropout any good is the same thing that makes it frustrating to watch: Holmes is given an empathetic edit (the kind, mind you, that browner, Blacker, poorer offenders never get; white, wealthy, conventionally attractive CEOs are front and center in these shows for a reason). Of course, not everyone read the news articles and the book, listened to the podcast, and watched the documentary. The Dropout will be many viewers’ first encounter with the story. But if you have engaged with other steps of this IP farming, the retelling gets mundane, especially when most of the context and complexity have been stripped away. And frankly, I don’t want to feel sorry for Holmes. I don’t really want to spend more time understanding why she did what she did. I already know why she did it: It’s always a predictable mix of greed, ego, and usually some institutional wealth. My empathy is finite, and I don’t feel like burning it on another white lady hustler who just happens to have Vanellope von Schweetz eyeballs."

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• The Dropout gets scam and tech culture right: "This lackluster true-con TV wave has made me wonder: it makes basic business sense to adapt headlining scams into scripted TV, but what do we want from these shows?" says Adrian Horton. "The speculative power of fiction does allow for new insight; dramatization can fill the emotional crevices of a mosaic of source material – the real-time news coverage, documentaries, podcasts, TV news investigations and commentary. It’s always intriguing to see if an actor can pull off the transformation into a famous figure, one whose ubiquity/notoriety we lived through online. There’s pleasure in playing voyeur to the boardrooms and yachts and open-floor offices where comically vast amounts of money change hands, lies are peddled and consequential decisions are made. But these recent shows have so far felt … off, like plaster cast versions of recent history. It’s hard not to compare The Dropout to Inventing Anna: two shows about two ambitious bottle blondes with conspicuously bad split ends and distinctive vocal tics (Delvey’s harsh accent from nowhere, Holmes’s bizarrely lowered pitch) who, despite off-putting behavior, amassed clout in the 2010s through capriciousness and brazen fabrications. Unlike Inventing Anna, The Dropout doesn’t change any names or scramble the timeline. Its journalist character, the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who appears in later episodes, is actually good at his job. (More scam content: Carreyrou’s book, Bad Blood, itself the basis for Alex Gibney’s 2019 HBO documentary The Inventor, has been optioned by Apple TV for a film by Adam McKay that is, as of now, still in development.) And whereas Inventing Anna seemed in thrall to its subject – the story is framed around a fictional journalist impressed by Anna’s audacity – The Dropout imagines the desperation and emotional extremity undergirding Elizabeth’s lies without obscuring their cost."
• The Dropout's fourth episode is it's best yet because it's not dependent on a known liar's story: "My biggest issue with the first three episodes of The Dropout is its desire to make sense of Elizabeth Holmes," says Randall Colburn. "The show wants to understand how Holmes went from an eccentric and potentially brilliant healthcare innovator to a cold, calculating huckster capable of sociopathic levels of deception. The problem is: Who the hell even knows? We know what she’s told the media. We know what she’s said in court. But we also know she’s a liar. That’s what she’s best known for, in fact. In the real world, Holmes remains an inscrutable figure." So it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow when The Dropout draws such a stark line between old Elizabeth (wide-eyed and open-hearted) and new Elizabeth (severe and cold-blooded), stressing as it has the corrupting influences of both her mentor and lover, Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), and the fake-it-till-you-make-it pressures of Silicon Valley...'Old White Men' works better than the episodes that came before it because it isn’t trying to wrestle with Elizabeth’s blurry moral compass. By shifting the focus away from her and Sunny and onto two different sets of associates, the show allows us to see how the public-facing Elizabeth entranced and alienated those in her orbit. It’s also very funny, but we’ll get to that."
• Why The Dropout creator Liz Meriwether infused the show with atrocious dancing: What stuck out to Meriwether was one of Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos colleagues recalling Holmes getting her groove on to a hip-hop song in her car one morning. “That really stuck in my head, because it felt like, ‘Oh, that’s something that she does when no one is looking,’” says Meriwether. “I kind of built on that one anecdote and tried to kind of make it a thing throughout the series.” That, says Meriwether, helped in balancing empathy and schadenfreude throughout the series. When approached to The Dropout, Meriwether was unsure what she could add. The solution, she decided, would be to “engage with the story on a more human level.”
• Meriwether weighs in on the slew of recent shows based on actual events: "I don't know. It's really incredible, the amount of stories that are coming out," she says. "I mean, I do think in the past few years, the idea of an objective truth has gotten a little fuzzier. I think people have so much skepticism about everything and there's a feeling that a truth doesn't exist that we can all agree on. And so I think people are examining truth and lies, and stories that people tell that we believe. I think that's all coming under the microscope and I think that started a few years ago."
• Alan Ruck found The Dropout a "refreshing" change from Succession -- especially getting to sing a Katy Perry song: “After three years of your brothers and sisters (onscreen) calling you an idiot, you kind of feel it for a while,” says Ruck, referring to Connor’s dynamic with his Succession siblings. “At least coming over to (The Dropout), nobody was abusing my character to his face. That was refreshing.” As for singing Perry's "Firework," he says: “I think it’s funny that he chooses to sing that song. He’s in this funny place in his life where he’s having a late midlife crisis, and is energized by this young woman (Holmes). He starts singing about how he’s going to turn it all loose like a firework."