The Dropout
Disney+, now streaming
Last week, I expressed my frustration that Netflix’s latest true-crime drama series Inventing A nna was a mess. This week, along comes another similarly dramatised true story – of how Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos tech start-up went horrendously wrong. And so far, The Dropout is doing a pretty good job avoiding all the Inventing Anna pitfalls. Of course, like every drama series these days, it jumps around in time. Because that’s the law. So, the story begins in 2017, with Holmes (played by Amanda Seyfried), facing a good grilling by legal types, before flashing back a few years to 2015 when she became “the youngest self-made billionaire in the US”, before flashing back even further to 1995 when she’s a schoolkid who even her own family think is a bit odd. Eventually, ep one settles on 2001 as its main time period, which was when Holmes’ dad lost his job. Her laser-focused determination to make something of herself is announced early on when, aged 17, she tells her family she’s going to launch her own company and make a billion dollars. Seyfried is quite brilliant at personifying Holmes’ almost psychotic single-mindedness – her eyes burning with ambition. When she arrives at top US college Stanford, she won’t take shit from any of the mostly male professors, who think she’s merely a delusional oddball. Which she may well be. The series skillfully focuses all its energy on trying to explain how the hell this woman ended up convincing so many people that a thumb-prick of blood could be analysed to help diagnose myriad diseases. Elizabeth is a complicated, deeply flawed character, and unlike Inventing Anna, this account of how she achieved and then destroyed her insane dream makes total sense.