FALSE IDOL

”I BELIEVED IN her,” chemist Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry) says of tech mogul Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) midway through the Hulu docudrama The Dropout. “I looked in her eyes and I thought . . . I thought I could see the future.” Ian is far from the only person to believe this of Holmes, whose company, Theranos, promised to revolutionize health care with a device that would run multiple tests from a single drop of blood. The cult of personality around the black-clad Holmes helped attract heavyweights like former Secretary of State George Shultz (Sam Waterston) to the company’s board, and The Dropout digitally inserts Seyfried into clips of the real Holmes being lauded by Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.

But Holmes was a fraud who could never get her miracle machine to work — yet for years managed to keep this fact hidden from board members, investors, and eventually from the very real people who were relying on Theranos’ creation to inform their own medical decisions.

There’s little that’s new in The Dropout, especially if you listened to the podcast of the same name that inspired it. But the miniseries, adapted by New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether, is nonetheless a slickly entertaining account of tech-world confidence run amok. Seyfried gets the voice right — both the deep register that Holmes adopted to seem more commanding as well as her halting cadence — but more important, captures the emotional complexity of a woman who for a long time convinced herself that she wasn’t a con artist. Lost alum Naveen Andrews is chilling as Holmes’ boyfriend and business partner, Sunny Balwani, and director Michael Showalter hurls an army of familiar character actors at Seyfried to help capture just how easy it was for everyone to fall under Holmes’ spell.

It’s a maddening, gripping, and at times startlingly funny re-creation of a story that almost feels too absurd to be true.