A tiny drop of blood, instead of a needle and a lab, and a radical idea to revolutionize medicine, disrupt the entire health care system, and maybe even change the world. This was the infamous Elizabeth Holmes/ Theranos story: a young, ambitious entrepreneur with a bold idea, inspiring a great suspension of disbelief in a lot of people dying to believe in her. It’s also a becoming-all-too-familiar tale of toxic tech hubris swollen with cart-before-the-horse overconfidence — the tech unicorn company tried to sell their ideas based on a technology they hadn’t yet created, defrauding investors out of billions in the process, hurting patients, and disgracing their founder and company in the process.
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So, in Hulu’s terrifically compelling “The Dropout,” from writer/showrunner Liz Merriweather (“New Girl”), this refreshing infusion of new blood that dazzles the entire tech industry quickly begins to curdle and then clot. This notorious true-to-life “Bad Blood” saga is one of in-over-your-head downfall, and you know how that ends. But the journey to that logical conclusion is a fascinating one that scans like a journalistic procedural that’s also something of an expansive, time-spanning thriller. Think, “The Social Network” if it were less clinical, more emotionally perceptive, and somehow even sometimes sympathetic towards its similarly strange, dissocial, and pathological protagonist. It’s also led by an outstanding performance by Amanda Seyfried—quickly becoming one of our best actresses—whose discomfiting, hypnotic gaze is as piercing as the never-break-eye-contact one that Holmes used to mesmerize her investors and many apostles.
Chiefly directed by Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”), while “The Dropout” begins in the late ’90s, with Holmes as a child to help set the lay of the land—a driven girl, and a family of inventors who hit a major setback when her Enron-employee father loses his job—the story begins in earnest in 2003 while she’s attending Stanford University. Steve Jobs’ name is mentioned often throughout the series (same with Mark Zuckerberg), and he’s right there, staring back at her from a poster on her college dorm room wall. She idolizes the tech icon as someone who could “understand her vision,” the oft-repeated phrase used to dismiss those who cannot get on board with her big ideas. “Do, or do not, there is no try,” she says, quoting Yoda to an unimpressed science professor (Laurie Metcalf). Holmes’ big idea to change the world is so self-convincing that she drops out of college, but not before meeting self-made millionaire Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews) on a school trip abroad, trying to broaden her horizons and expand her Mandarin. Balwani soon becomes number two in her story. 19 years older than her, he eventually becomes her secret lover, over time sitting next to her on the Theranos throne as her unhinged bulldog and bad cop, helping cover up her deceits, a mountain of lies, while trying to whip her company into shape through sheer brutish force.
“This is an inspiring step forward,” Holmes (Seyfried) tells herself in the mirror in rehearsal mode, through snotty tears, at a pivotal moment of rock bottom failure. She repeats the refrain over and over again, angrily, as if to employ the phrase to stamp out the crackling embers of self-doubt, toying with the lower register of her voice, like an A.I. robot trying to cosplay as confident CEO speaker. She’s either a borderline sociopath with no sense of empathy beyond her self-purpose or just a young, pretty, ambitious girl trying to better the world, depending on how your depth of field has been affected.
“I’m just a girl with a dream to change the world,” Holmes says a few scenes later, biting back tears, successfully throwing a hail Mary and emotionally manipulating the Theranos board to not oust her as CEO (while once again promising a life-saving multi-million-dollar investment in the company the investor hasn’t yet agreed to). These tricky emotional moments, a complex mix of self-delusion, confidence and playing pretend, are reminiscent of the professed “reality distortion field” term—the psychological phenomenon associated with Apple iconoclast Steve Jobs wherein by radiating an enchanting energy of charisma, confidence, and magnetism, so intoxicating it temporarily short-circuited the disbelief of those around him and always persuaded them to move forward without objection. But what if the RDF became so powerful it worked on the very subject themselves and pulled them out of their own reality vortex, warping their own worldview?
While Merriweather’s tremendous mini-series never explicitly mentions the RDF, it’s part of a series of psycho-social phenomena that helps explain the complex story of Holmes and Theranos, a narrative also rich with a potent collision of ideas and themes—the dark side of ambition, Icarus-like tech arrogance, imposter syndrome, the blurry lines between female tenacity and empowerment vs. faux feminism, corporate FOMO and a desperate need to believe in, discover, and be on the coattails of the next Mark Zuckerberg.
Trying to unpack the entire trajectory of the eight-episode, fall-from-grace story is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say, there are dozens of juicy, engrossing, and entertaining layers and characters. To that end, there’s an amazing, sprawling who’s who cast of phenomenal character actors loaded out through the entire story. Elizabeth Marvel and Michel Gill play her supportive parents, Bill Irwin, Stephen Fry, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Michael Ironside, Bashir Salahuddin, James Hiroyuki Liao are among some of the chief members of the Theranos support system, as either bio-engineers, scientists, colleagues, or investors, and William H. Macy stars as one of the chief villains of the story, as Richard Fuisz, a real inventor, and entrepreneur, who is depicted as a mean-spirited, bitter shitbag who tries to f*ck over Holmes with a competing medical patent because as a family friend, he’s upset that she didn’t call for advice (so many more words could be committed to this part of the story including Macy’s hilariously—intentionally bad?—receding hairline wig which is ridiculous, but really helps seal the notion of Fuisz as a nasty, festering heel who is so evil, it engenders deep empathy towards Holmes). The utterly stacked series also features Sam Waterston, Michaela Watkins, LisaGay Hamilton, Dylan Minnette, Kurtwood Smith, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and many more in key supporting roles.
Having Showalter on board is a nice touch and his flair for comedy is not laid to waste. Part of the Theranos defrauding scandal story is duping Walgreens into buying into their scam and investing to be the source of their “wellness centers” (i.e., the place where patients could safely, happily, and conveniently check their blood at Walgreens with a small prick of the finger and wait 5 minutes for the results—if only that technology actually existed and worked, whoops). The delightful fourth episode, “Old White Men,” is hysterical and features a quartet of bumbling Keystone Cops-like Walgreens execs Josh Pais, Alan Ruck, Andrew Leeds, and Rich Sommer. Their subtle comedy, chemistry, and the cutting of the interplay are a sheer joy to watch.
Moreover, the episode speaks to the theme of old, out-of-touch dinosaurs desperate to be on the cutting edge of start-up culture and the anxiety of being left behind in the world of innovation. Or, as Sommer’s deeply skeptical lab supervisor says, exasperated by how Walgreens seems so eager to get on their knees, “What is it that makes people want to believe so badly?” All of these little notions add up to paint a very convincing picture of how the Theranos fraud took root.
There are so many incredible telling, prophetic, and jaw-dropping moments of supersonic horseshit said within “The Dropout” it’s hard to choose just one. “I’m rooting for you,” a defecting Apple designer Ana Arriola (Nicky Endres), who happens to be trans, says at one point, speaking to the manner in which Theranos’ gender and appearance helped her at first. “Honestly, it’s really exciting to me that you’re a young female CEO, instead of a cocky little boy in a sweatshirt.”
“The outsiders, we have to stick together; that’s how we change the world,” Theranos replies, in one of her million, self-possessed lines of utter snake oil deceit. These moments also detail how Seyfried channels Holmes’ strange charms and the destabilizing DRF, further bolstered by her good looks and how her gender produces goodwill. Merriweather’s series, however, is nuanced and careful not to craft an anti-feminist narrative either, and quick and judicious to use people like Metcalf’s professor character—who sees right through her lack of transparency and charlatan Messiah routine—to note how women in tech will be set back years once Holmes’ obvious grift is exposed.
So what is the dark side of self-belief? It might be a slightly inhuman, but observant person so crafty, she uses a familiar phrase used against her—“she needs adult supervision”— to her favor in a time of need, just as Holmes does, in a bit that’s like mental jiu-jitsu. There’s much to love about “The Dropout,” though if there’s one strike against it, it’s the incessant use of unnecessarily and overly hip needle drops (LCD Soundsystem, Wolf Parade, Talking Heads, et al, though thematically, MGMT’s “Fated To Pretend” is pretty perfect). Though some of the music choices, like key songs by Katy Perry, are used to help orient the viewer to time (the story starts in 2003 runs up until circa 2015, when the bombshell article from the Wall Street Journal exposes her scam but jumps back and forth at first).
Each episode does a fabulous job of breaking down key aspects of Holmes’ personality that explain who she is thematically. Episode one, “I’m In A Hurry,” encapsulates her drive, ambition, and impatience, dropping out of Stanford mid-semester because she knows she has a billion-dollar idea that must be explored immediately. Episode three, “Green Juice” is like her villain origin story, how she transforms from a disheveled CEO, who never thinks about how she dresses or her unkempt hair, to discovering her Steve Jobs-like super suit of armor and self-reliance: the all-black suit and turtle neck that defined her look in the media. The episode also crystallizes one of the series’ themes: the fine line between self-belief and delusion and the way confidence can eventually congeal into self-deception when run unchecked.
“This is an inspiring step forward,” Seyfried as Holmes repeats into the mirror, staring at herself with a nearly unhinged expression, trying to distort her own reality field and bend it to her indomitable will. In superhero parlance, this might be Holmes’ point-of-no return Joker moment. Others may call it the clip that plays before her impending Emmy victory, and some might just call it a fabulous moment in intensely captivating television. [A]