Pick of the week ROB OWEN
Post-Gazette TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week
MONDAY
“The Inventor,” 9 p.m., HBO.
The story of the collapse of biomedical company Theranos and its baffling founder, Elizabeth Holmes, has been told before in book (“Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” by John Carreyrou) and newsmagazine form. But for anyone interested in learning more or for anyone who hasn’t dipped into this bizarre story, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” offers a feature-length examination in advance of a feature film that’s to star Jennifer Lawrence as Ms. Holmes.
Theranos claimed to have revolutionized blood testing and raised millions in venture capital but it turned out their blood test did not actually work.
“John’s book, which is a tremendous book, does a magnificent job of really digging into forensic detail of what happened. … ‘The Inventor’ really does focus on the psychology of fraud, the psychology of deception, the psychology of self-deception, and that was by intent,” said writer/director Alex Gibney in a February HBO press conference during the Television Critics Association winter 2019 press tour in Pasadena, Caif. “The inclusion of Dan Ariely, who has a very wonderful and important experiment about dice in the film, really goes a long way to helping you understand that when you hear the phrase, ‘The end justifies the means…’ We’re all inclined to think, ‘Oh, that’s probably a good thing. If there’s a noble end, okay. People fudge things, but they’re really going for something good,’ as if that’s the good news. I don’t think that’s the good news. I think that’s the bad news, because people, when they have a noble cause, and the police have a phrase for it called ‘noble cause corruption,’ when they have a noble cause they feel empowered or entitled to do very bad things in pursuit of that noble cause and, also, to be convincing sometimes when they lie about it. So that aspect of the psychology where you can, at once, be believing that you’re telling the truth even while you know you’re telling a lie was very interesting to me.”