On the small screen, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of misguided tech geniuses. We’ve just seen Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Uber’s ultra-driven former CEO Travis Kalanick in Super Pumped, and next month Jared Leto will star as Messianically complex WeWork founder Adam Neumann in WeCrashed. But before that comes the sorry tale of Theranos’s duplicitous wunderkind, Elizabeth Holmes. Adapted from the hit podcast, The Dropout sees Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried donning the turtleneck and dropping her voice an octave (or two), in order to become the woman whose mysterious downfall has captivated the world for the past couple of years.
In a nutshell, The Dropout picks the Elizabeth Holmes story up in the sun-tinged days of childhood innocence, before rapidly accelerating through a tale of success and failure, rise and fall. “This is Google, this is Yahoo, but this is better,” Holmes tells her audience, “this is gonna help people.” The show’s McGuffin is Theranos’s Edison machine; a tiny, sleek box that, with just a prick of your finger, could offer a huge range of medical diagnoses. Except it couldn’t, of course. This is one thread of The Dropout; a story of hubristic delusion.
