The Dropout on Hulu makes an unconvincing case for Elizabeth Holmes’ humanity

Before her downfall and recent conviction for defrauding investors, the founder of Theranos was a subject of fascination within Silicon Valley and the tech press. The Dropout is confident that people still want to know more about the woman behind the medtech unicorn.

Adapted from ABC News' investigative true crime show hosted by Rebecca Jarvis, The Dropout tells the story of a college student's journey from a half-baked dream to reality.

The new show, which was co-executive produced with Michael Showalter, is similar to the podcasts in that it lays out a timeline of events beginning in the childhood of the main character. The Dropout's dramatization of past events pulls heavily from the reporting of the show, but it is more comfortable editorializing with a story that frames the woman as a visionary-turned-fraudster.

Hulu

The Dropout is as busy as it is focused. In the first few episodes, it jumps back and forth between moments from the past and the present, as she is being deposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Dropout tries to make you understand how she got there by zeroing in on the fact that the public still took the carefully-constructed idea of ElizabethHolmes, blood wunderkind, at face value.

The Dropout suggests that the root of the girl's ambition and fixation with money is her relationships with her mother and father. Richard Fuisz, a physician and inventor who expresses interest in learning more about Elizabeth's work, intensified his competition with the Holmes family.

The Dropout focuses on the life and relationships of Holmes as a commentary on the culture that gave birth to the concept of $1 billion unicorns. The Dropout makes the impression that the same culture that pushes Holmes to study abroad in Beijing pushes her to forge a relationship with Balwani, a man nearly two decades her senior.

Hulu

The Dropout's big plot points are based in reality, but the show weaves them all together into a singular narrative, which can be read as the continued mythologization ofHolmes.

Fuisz and Balwani are two powerful men who come into the world looking to challenge or take advantage of her. The Dropout doesn't depict them as being part of a grand scheme to take down the man, but it does make a point of highlighting how figures like them have been present in her story. This is what makes The Dropout both somewhat dubious as an account of howHolmes got into a life of white-collar crime, and kind of interesting as a critique of Silicon Valley itself as it begins to surrender to the Jobsian distortions of reality.

The Dropout takes a long time before it trains its focus on specific bits of deception and manipulation, which were used to convince people to trust her. In doing so, the show uses its supporting cast to show the degree to which people were willing to support causes larger than themselves in order to feel better about themselves. Because of this, The Dropout often feels as if it's handling the story with kid gloves, and only feels comfortable being critical of her in moments that lend themselves to depicting her as cartoonishly-awkward.

For all the punches that The Dropout's script seems like it's pulling, the performance of Seyfried is hard to ignore. What is infinitely more fascinating is how the voice is first introduced, and how it is introduced in the show. The Dropout presents her tone, mannerisms, and fashion sense as modular aspects of her identity that she learns to swap out in efforts to impress people.

Hulu

The Dropout tries to show how much reinvention of the self is something that nearly everyone does, and it's also odd that the movie's main character looks and sounds like she's standing in front of a mirror. As the show begins to broach his idea a bit more deeply, The Dropout drops it in favor of portraying all of the eccentricities of the man.

The Dropout doesn't say that she isn't responsible for her actions. It asks you to wonder who is to blame in an industry where faking it until one makes it is how many successful people have played the game. As you get deeper into The Dropout, the show feels more hesitant to let itself and the audience go and sit with how bad things became at Theranos.

It's hard to say what the show brings in terms of new insight or clarity into Holmes, when you look at The Dropout as part of the larger constellation ofHolmes-related media that has come out over the past few years. The Dropout makes perfect sense because it is a piece of entertainment tailor-made for Hollywood's current obsession with true crime.

The Dropout also stars Anne Archer, Michaela Watkins, Kate Burton, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Michael Ironside, Laurie Metcalf, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Kevin Sussman, LisaGay Hamilton, and Kurtwood Smith. On March 3rd, the series will be on the streaming service.