If it feels like there have been countless projects in the works about ex-Silicon Valley prodigy Elizabeth Holmes for years, it’s because there have been. As a culture, we love watching the ultra-wealthy crumble at the hands of their own hubris, and Holmes sparked more schadenfreude than any other case in recent memory. Holmes was the lauded CEO of Theranos, a biotech company that claimed to have invented a machine that could run dozens of blood tests using just a drop of blood. At its peak, Theranos was valued at $10 billion and counted Henry Kissinger among its board members. In January 2022, Holmes was found guilty on multiple counts of defrauding investors and wire fraud.
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The Hulu original series The Dropout is the first dramatization of the rise and fall of Theranos. The Dropout is based on an ABC podcast series of the same name that started in 2019 and continued through Holme’s trial in 2022. The first season of the Hulu show covers the first season of the podcast, which details how Holmes went from a precocious Stanford student to become the poster child for corruption in Silicon Valley.
Starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes and Naveen Andrews as her business and romantic partner Sunny Balwani, the show depicts many of the Theranos employees, investors, scientists, and journalists interviewed or described in the podcast. Listeners of the podcast will recognize some of the names, but even if you haven’t listened, the show does a good job of contextualizing the people in each era of Holmes’ life who either enabled her or tried to stop her.
The show sticks so faithfully to the podcast that it sometimes feels like the project is unnecessary. What does a dramatization add that a documentary or piece of journalism hasn’t already covered? That’s always the question when it comes to true stories like this that end up told in a dozen different forms. Like the films and TV shows covering notorious zookeeper Joe Exotic or New York
Source : time
