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The Dropout review – another mind-blowing portrait of a great American fraudster

Yes it’s clunky at points, but Amanda Seyfried excels as one-time billionaire grifter Elizabeth Holmes – and the story is simply too jaw-dropping to pass up

W e have barely had time to draw breath after the whirlwind anti-romance that was Inventing Anna, the story of super-grifter Anna Sorokin, who parlayed an innate grasp of upper-class manners into a life of plenty among the moneyed elite of New York (until they found out they were the ones funding it). Now we have The Dropout (Disney+), the story of the other great female fraudster of recent years, Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the medical company Theranos. It claimed it had developed technology that would revolutionise blood testing, and with it a massive part of the US healthcare system. In 2015, Forbes named Holmes the youngest self-made female billionaire in the country, after Theranos was valued at $9bn (£6.75bn). Her downfall, once rumours of fraud started circulating, was precipitate. She is now on bail awaiting sentencing for convictions for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Unlike Inventing Anna, which was a heady, soapy rush that enjoyed the glamour of its protagonist, and wasn’t too bothered by any need to investigate her motivations, The Dropout plays it straight. Possibly too straight – there are times when a little levity as the impossibilities mount would not go amiss – but all in the service of a story that blows your mind quite as comprehensively as Sorokin’s.

The storytelling is largely linear (a great relief after Inventing Anna’s back-and-forthing and the general fashion for importing tension via flashbacks and flash-forwards rather than actual writing). And so – brief opening scene of her giving a deposition before trial aside – we first meet Holmes as an 11-year-old child, running so slowly in a race that the rest of the runners have gathered at the finish line to wait, while the teacher begs her to give up. She does not, of course.

There we have the essence of our antihero and this eight-hour miniseries. One is determined to succeed, the other determined to make its messages clear every step of the way. See also: mother laboriously depicted as self-centred and cold; father better, but emphatically a vice-president at scandal-hit accountancy firm Enron. It hits every traditional beat: mapping out the origins of Holmes’s particular interest (mother’s fear of needles); a montage of rejections as she tries to get her initial funding; the disaster in the lab as the last potential investor rounds the corner; her mesmerised walk around the room as she arrives in her first luxury hotel suite as CEO (never mind that Holmes was from a wealthy, well-connected family and was, we may safely assume, well-used to hot water and gathered curtains).

So The Dropout is a lumbering beast, but saved by two things. The first is that it is simply such a good a story that you would have to deal it actual hammer blows to kill its fascination. Because – I’m sorry, did I not say? Tiny detail, often slipped the inventor’s mind, too – the technology did not work. Not properly. It worked a few times in a small way, just enough to give hope to those involved but, crucially, not on the day they showed it to investors. Holmes faked the results it apparently spewed out in front of them. From there, there was no going back.

Its second saviour is the solid cast, led by Amanda Seyfried as Holmes. It’s a hugely skilful performance (even before she has to pull off Holmes’s famous vocal evolution), which manages to keep in balance all the disparate elements of a woman who seems, by all accounts, to have been a very strange admixture. She was demonstrably clever but slow to realise the value of “soft” skills, blunt but charming, hyperfocused but chaotic. Seyfried makes it all work and keeps our attention – even our sympathy – as Holmes’s desperation to make a name for herself and prove that her intelligence and drive are worth something tangible slips further and further into corruption and lies.

Along the way, the show touches on issues that may have motivated Holmes to act the way she did – constantly proving herself the equal of the men at Stanford University, having to face down the tech bros of Silicon Valley, getting caught up with a manipulative older man, Sunny Balwani (played Naveen Andrews). But it doesn’t shy away from the fact that there was really only one person who built Theranos – from literally nothing, as it turned out – and who brought all $9bn of it down.

The Dropout

TV Mini Series

TV series that chronicles Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' attempt to revolutionize the healthcare industry after dropping out of college and starting a technology company. TV series that chronicles Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' attempt to revolutionize the healthcare industry after dropping out of college and starting a technology company. TV series that chronicles Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' attempt to revolutionize the healthcare industry after dropping out of college and starting a technology company.

Elizabeth Meriwether
Amanda Seyfried
Naveen Andrews
Michel Gill
169 User reviews
37 Critic reviews
12 wins & 37 nominations total

How Amanda Seyfried Instantly Snaps Into Character as Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Holmes

Sunny Balwani

Chris Holmes

Richard Fuisz

Noel Holmes

George Shultz

Charlotte Shultz

Rochelle Gibbons

Ian Gibbons

Channing Robertson

Dr. Phyllis Gardner

Tyler Shultz

Lorraine Fuisz

Rakesh Dewan

John Carreyrou

Judith Baker

Erika Cheung

Brendan Morris
All cast & crew
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Trivia In the last scene of the episode "Old White Men", there's a brief shot of Kevin Hunter idly running his finger along the proprietary security tape on the Edison blood tester. This hints at an actual event cited in the series' source novel, where Hunter tried unsuccessfully to get permission to open up one of the blood testers and see if it was actually capable of testing blood.
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User reviews 169

midnitepantera
Mar 13, 2022
How many seasons does The Dropout have? Powered by Alexa
March 3, 2022 (United States)
United States
University of California Los Angeles, California, USA (Stanford University)
20th Television
Elizabeth Meriwether Pictures
Searchlight Television
See more company credits at IMDbPro

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Runtime 50 minutes
Dolby Digital

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The Dropout

Where to watch.

Watch The Dropout with a subscription on Hulu, Disney+.

Cast & Crew

Amanda Seyfried

Elizabeth Holmes

Naveen Andrews

Sunny Balwani

William H. Macy

Richard Fuisz

Laurie Metcalf

Phyllis Gardner

Elizabeth Marvel

Noel Holmes

Channing Robertson

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‘The Dropout’ Shows How Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes’ Blood Ran Cold

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

“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, the Edison, that would run multiple tests from a single drop of blood. The cult of personality around the black-clad young woman 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 — and managed to keep this fact hidden for years from board members, investors, and eventually from the very real people who were relying on Theranos’ creation to inform their medical decisions.

Between The Dropout , Netflix’s con-woman tale Inventing Anna , Showtime’s Uber origin story Super Pumped , and Apple’s upcoming WeWork miniseries WeCrashed , we are nearing Peak Scammer TV. More often than not, these stories involve the tech sector run amok, trying to reinvent things that already exist and somehow making them worse in the process. (Even Anna Delvey spends an episode of Inventing Anna helping her boyfriend pitch his dream-journal app.) At one point here, Holmes quotes Mark Zuckerberg’s famous “move fast and break things” mantra, and The Dropout continually illustrates how easy it is to break things and how hard it is to get them right.

Revelation-wise, there’s little that’s new in The Dropout , especially if you listened to the podcast of the same name that inspired it. But showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether and Seyfried do an excellent job of unpacking how Holmes slipped into con artistry, step by step, and how she managed to fool so many people for so long. Meriwether is best known for creating the Fox sitcom New Girl , which at first might seem an odd match for a ripped-from-the-headlines account like this. But throughout, it’s not hard to view The Dropout as a tale of adorkability’s dark side. In early scenes set around the time Holmes began attending Stanford, Seyfried plays her(*) as enthusiastic but socially challenged — “I don’t feel things the way other people feel things,” she admits later to Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), the much older man she falls for on a trip to China — and an idealist who believes she can make the world a better place. (We also get a reminder early on that corporate chicanery didn’t exactly originate in Silicon Valley, as Elizabeth’s father is working as an executive at Enron when that company goes bankrupt over accounting fraud.) When she’s alone, she’s fond of dancing and/or singing with awkward abandon, and she dreamed up the Edison in part out of her own fear of getting her blood drawn. And on a sadly ironic note, she can’t get anyone to believe her after she’s raped by a fellow student, though she would soon be able to pull the wool over the eyes of powerful men like Shultz or venture capitalist Don Lucas (Michael Ironside), continually covering for the failures of the Edison.

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(*) Originally, Kate McKinnon was set to play Holmes, but she dropped out before filming began. (Those needing a true-crime fix with her will have to wait for Joe vs. Carole , Peacock’s scripted version of the Tiger King story. ) McKinnon and Seyfried are close in age, but it’s hard to imagine McKinnon playing Holmes at 18 without it feeling like a comedy sketch.

Holmes starts out as a believer herself, convinced that the Edison is just a step or two away from working, and that she — and, after she brings him in as COO to fend off a challenge by her board members, Sunny — just has to keep the company funded long enough for the crucial breakthrough to happen. As a result, the early episodes have a lighter, caper-like tone. They don’t necessarily invite you to root for the Theranos team, but they have fun showing the mechanics of how Holmes and her cronies pulled off various deceptions. The fourth episode, aptly titled “Old White Men,” is a particular treat, with Alan Ruck playing a Walgreens executive desperate to combat his fears of aging and irrelevance by teaming up with this exciting new venture, and Rich Somer from Mad Men as a consultant crying in vain that the empress has no clothes.

After a while, though, Holmes becomes less a believer in the project than in her own rising celebrity. Yes, Seyfried does the voice — the improbably deep register, halting cadence and all — but in a much more interesting and convincing way than Julia Garner mimicking Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna . Part of the trick is that she doesn’t start out so deep, but rather takes it on as an affectation — a way for the confrontation-averse Holmes to feel like she should be the one giving orders to employees who keep pushing back about problems with the Edison. And as she learns to take control, she starts to become dangerous, and The Dropout pivots into more of a horror story, showing Holmes and Balwani’s ruthless attempts(*) to silence potential whistleblowers like Ian, Shultz’s grandson Tyler (Dylan Minnette), or new employee Erika (Camryn Mi-young Kim). Throughout, Meriwether and chief director Michael Showalter hurl an army of familiar character actors like Fry and Waterston at Holmes to capture just how easy it was for everyone to fall under her spell.

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Amanda seyfried in hulu’s ‘the dropout’: tv review.

The actress plays Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in this limited series costarring Naveen Andrews.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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For those exhausted by a winter pondering the solvency of cryptocurrency, the tangibility of NFTs and the alleged unmasking of QAnon, TV is offering a very strange form of escapism.

Hardly a week seems to be passing without the premiere of a new limited series about real-life fraud and corruption, usually focusing on the Internet as a pit of degradation capable of cultivating such deceit, often centering around a photogenic blonde protagonist.

The Dropout

Airdate: Thursday, March 3 (Hulu)

Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Naveen Andrews

Creator: Elizabeth Meriwether from the ABC Audio podcast

The fun game, honestly, has been picking out which parts of the Venn diagram they do or don’t fulfill. Netflix’s Inventing Anna , about social media-spawned con artist Anna Delvey, checks every box. In Hulu’s Pam & Tommy , the photogenic blonde protagonist is a victim of the Internet’s insatiable maw, not a perpetrator. In Showtime’s Super Pumped , the grossness comes from dude-bros. In NBC’s The Thing About Pam , the twist is that a photogenic blonde actress (Renee Zellweger) is pretending to be an unphotogenic criminal. In Apple TV+’s WeCrashed: The Rise and Fall of WeWork , Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto are brunettes.

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'The Dropout' Review: Amanda Seyfried Leads a Sturdy but Overly Straightforward Drama

Seyfried stars as disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu depiction of a distinctly American scandal.

A handful of months after the release of Dopesick and mere weeks after premiering Pam & Tommy , Hulu continues its quest to leave no American scandal un-dramatized with The Dropout , an eight-episode miniseries tracking the rise and eventual downfall of Elizabeth Holmes. At the age of 19, Holmes dropped out of Stanford University and used her unspent college tuition to launch Theranos, a technology company that promised to revolutionize the healthcare industry with a new type of portable blood-testing machine. According to Theranos, these machines could offer a wide range of quick diagnoses based on a single drop of blood from a simple finger prick. The only problem? The technology didn’t actually work.

That didn’t stop Holmes and her enablers from lying their way to a $10 billion valuation, bilking investors, putting patients at risk, and making Holmes a CEO superstar in the process. In January, she was convicted of four counts of fraud and is currently awaiting sentencing, which could top out at 20 years in prison. The Dropout , based on a 2019 ABC News podcast covering the whole debacle, stars Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, an awkward but focused young woman who lays out her life goals pretty early on in the show: “I don’t want to be President,” she says. “I want to be a billionaire.”

The series begins with re-enacted clips of Holmes’ 2017 legal deposition (which are scattered throughout the series) but soon jumps back to 2002, when the story starts in earnest. Staying in Beijing for a pre-college Mandarin language program, Holmes has a tough time making friends but strikes up a relationship with Sunny Balwani ( Naveen Andrews ), a Pakistani man 19 years her senior who’s back in school working toward a Master’s degree after selling a company he founded for a small fortune. The two become friends, then lovers, and eventually business partners, with Sunny’s darker side becoming more and more apparent as the show goes on. Once back in the states, Holmes, who is obsessed with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and bright enough to persuade one of the professors at Stanford to become an early ally, soon trades in higher education for an ant-infested office where she begins charting her nascent company’s world-changing mission.

RELATED: 'The Dropout' Trailer Reveals Amanda Seyfried as Disgraced Billionaire Elizabeth Holmes in New Hulu Series

Seyfried does good work mimicking Holmes’ notably odd mannerisms, including an artificially deep voice that Holmes concocted to give herself a more authoritative presence. But showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether , who created one of the last decade’s better hang-out sitcoms in New Girl , and her team, which also includes director Michael Showalter ( The Eyes of Tammy Faye ), perhaps wisely don’t attempt to turn Holmes into a sympathetic figure. Sure, they offer a few suggestions for where Holmes’ initial inspirations and unrelenting drive might have come from – early scenes highlight her father’s breakdown after getting laid-off from Enron and both her and her mother’s distaste for long, blood-drawing needles – but The Dropout doesn’t show a ton of interest in doing a deep dive on Holmes’ psyche (which occasionally results in it feeling like Seyfried is playing less of a character and more of a vessel for corporate vapidness).

Instead, the series mostly treats Elizabeth like the eccentric central figure in a much larger tapestry, one which includes greedy venture capitalists, brilliant scientists eager to believe in her vision of a better world, healthcare CEOs looking to latch themselves onto the next big thing, and a small team of truth-seekers who, for one reason or another, want to expose Holmes and Balwani’s ever-growing mountain of lies. It’s a lot to cover, and the series (of which reviewers were given every episode save the finale) jams it all in by making massive – and sometimes jarring — multi-year time jumps from one episode to the next. It’s also fair to point out that the world of tech start-ups and the fat cats who invest in them isn’t necessarily as colorful as, say, Pam & Tommy ’s universe of neon-lit rock clubs and low-rent porn sets. But Merriweather and the other writers are able to put enough of a focus on some of the more fascinating people who were in Theranos’ orbit to hold the viewer’s interest, even when the story itself is moving through time at a faster rate than it’s advancing the plot. (Those blood-testing machines just keep on not working, and Holmes just keeps on lying about it, from one episode to the next.)

The series’ most sympathetic figure ends up being Ian Gibbons ( Stephen Fry ), an aging biochemist who beat cancer but was left with chronic foot pain caused by the treatment. Gibbons starts off as a true believer on Elizabeth’s team who hopes the tech they’re working on can save thousands of lives, but he slowly begins to realize his boss is putting her own reputation ahead of the company’s stated goals. Gibbons is one of several figures who were duped by Holmes’ grand vision and found their lives devastatingly disrupted by the Theranos scandal. Fry is excellent in The Dropout and gives perhaps the series’ most robust and soulful performance.

Other members of the show’s large cast don’t get material as meaty but still find ways to leave their mark on the proceedings. Alan Ruck ( Succession ) livens things up considerably when he arrives in the fourth episode as an eager-to-please, Katy Perry-quoting Walgreens exec who can’t wait to get into business with Holmes. Ebon Moss-Barchrach ( The Punisher ) and LisaGay Hamilton ( The Practice ) have a great rapport as a Wall Street Journal reporter and editor who team up for a story that could make or break their careers. Kurtwood Smith ( That ‘70s Show ) and Laurie Metcalf ( The Conners ) bring their considerable gravitas to small but flashy roles. And then there’s William H. Macy , sporting an early contender for most intentionally awful costuming wig of the year as he plays a cantankerous Holmes family friend who holds a grudge against Elizabeth for never coming to him for business advice.

The Dropout makes attempts at touching on some larger themes, including the extra challenges faced by women CEOs (along with the damage that can be caused when a successful one is revealed to be a con artist) and the pitfalls of an American system of capitalism that’s more concerned about potential windfalls than honest results. Holmes standing in line for the launch of the first iPhone is one of several scenes that show how corporations and their CEOs can inspire a cult-like devotion in this modern, tech-driven age. But The Dropout refuses to ever fully lock on to a clear mission statement of its own, instead dutifully plowing through the facts of the case — not entirely unlike the various articles, documentaries, and podcasts that have already covered the Theranos scandal.

Because of that, it’s ultimately worth asking: Is The Dropout even necessary? But this is 2022, where umpteen streaming services need to be steadily delivering content to their subscribers, so of course, a story this salacious and juicy was going to get the prestige miniseries treatment. And the good news is, even if it never develops into a more intriguing whole, The Dropout is made of up enough solid components — whether it’s the early trials and tribulations of the well-meaning lab workers or the corporate-thriller turn that the story eventually takes — that anyone watching should be able to find something that appeals to them.

The Dropout premieres with its first three episodes on March 3 exclusively on Hulu, with new episodes released weekly thereafter.

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In a Season of Subpar Scammer Shows, Only <em>The Dropout</em> Is the Real Thing

In a Season of Subpar Scammer Shows, Only The Dropout Is the Real Thing

The Dropout wants us to understand that Elizabeth Holmes is a deeply bizarre human being. Before plunging into the saga of Theranos, the notorious multibillion-dollar startup Holmes founded that fooled the world into believing it could revolutionize blood testing, the docudrama’s creator, Elizabeth Meriwether ( New Girl ) immerses viewers in that strangeness. The show opens with glimpses of Elizabeth at various telling moments from throughout her life—parroting a Mandarin tape on a drive home from high school; bristling at reporters’ softball questions; determinedly flailing her way to the finish line of a race that she, as a child, has lost by at least a lap. “Why does she run so weird?” her little brother demands, from the bleachers.

Maybe this obsession with Holmes’ personality sounds petty, or sexist. But here’s the thing: Most people who are likely to watch The Dropout (premiering March 3 on Hulu) already know plenty of facts about Theranos. They’ve read John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup , watched the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley , listened to the ABC News podcast from which The Dropout was adapted, or simply followed seven years’ worth of news about the company’s downfall. Meriwether seems to understand what the creators of many other recent docudramas , from Showtime’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber to Hulu’s own Dopesick , do not—that no one comes to these shows for a summary of what happened. What we want is to understand the people behind the headlines.

To that end, The Dropout takes on three intertwined questions: Who is Elizabeth Holmes? What could she possibly have been thinking? And how did she get so many rich, powerful, and accomplished people to believe her lies for so long? Whereas previous portraits have fixated on Holmes’ beauty, her youth, her artificially lowered voice and those black Steve Jobs turtlenecks she appropriated as a uniform, Meriwether and the show’s star— Amanda Seyfried in her most challenging and perhaps greatest role to date—probe beyond that incongruous surface.

The story begins in earnest with Elizabeth’s father Chris Holmes (Michael Gill) getting laid off from an imploding Enron, around the same time that Elizabeth is accepted to Stanford. During an awkward Christmas visit, Chris humbles himself to the family’s wealthy friend Richard Fuisz (an amusingly peevish William H. Macy), a controversial physician and inventor, in hopes of securing financial help. But Richard and teenage Elizabeth immediately clash; each is a threat to the other’s monster ego. While she’s insulted at his suggestion that she must be a legacy at Stanford, he’s taken aback by her confidence. (“I want to be a billionaire,” she announces. “First step is Stanford, and then I’m gonna graduate, and I plan on inventing a product and start a company.”) Richard’s vendetta against her begins when she replies to his condescending offer to teach her a thing or two: “Don’t you just file patents so companies have to pay you off?”

Too focused on achievement to find common ground with her peers, Elizabeth—who is so methodical, she settles on an ideal window to lose her virginity and only then starts looking for a partner—finally meets someone who seems to understand her on a Mandarin immersion trip. Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (a brooding Naveen Andrews), a successful tech entrepreneur who’s nearly two decades Elizabeth’s senior, believes in her vision and knows how to make her feel safe. His experience as a South Asian man in post-9/11 America has left him aggrieved. In an industry dominated by white guys, his money and her WASP pedigree combine to lend the pair legitimacy. And although both their romantic relationship and Sunny’s role at Theranos, which Elizabeth abruptly leaves Stanford to found, remain ambiguously defined, what’s apparent in this telling is that their allegedly toxic symbiosis sustained the company when science could not.

With her fundamental weirdness as the constant, The Dropout foregrounds Holmes’ transformation from an anxious, socially inept yet laser-focused teen into a self-styled dynamo who learns to fake her way through the tech world by imitating the powerful men who initially dismiss her. In a series of wonderfully unselfconscious moments, Seyfried gives us Elizabeth psyching herself up or siphoning off excess emotion by dancing to early-’00s indie rock with fearsome intensity. Instead of getting her hands dirty in a lab whose results almost seem to disappoint, she rehearses koans—“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”—and collects affectations that signify she’s a Silicon Valley insider, from the dudebro voice and the turtlenecks to a mercurial temper and an enthusiasm for green juice.

Seyfried resists any temptation to exaggerate these eccentricities; the performance is subtle enough to surface human vulnerabilities that might otherwise have been obscured by the character’s behavior. It’s a refreshing choice, at a time when so many docudramas delight in mocking their subjects. Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes a fine transformation into Super Pumped ’s antihero, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, but all that comes through in the script is nonspecific Type A machismo. In Peacock’s Tiger King series Joe vs. Carole (also out March 3), Kate McKinnon ’s broad portrayal of Carole Baskin is more impression than likeness. NBC’s upcoming true-crime burlesque The Thing About Pam sticks Renée Zellweger in a fat suit to play Pam Hupp and deploys wry, condescending narration that cheapens real people’s suffering.

The Dropout doesn’t exist to pile on Holmes, whose public humiliation has been ongoing since the mid-2010s. But neither does it come across as a reclamation in the style of Inventing Anna , which attempts to reframe another famous female scammer, Anna Delvey, as a snobby feminist Robin Hood. Elizabeth is less a generic woman posturing her way through a man’s world than a misfit whose drive for professional success—the only objective her brain seems equipped to pursue—knows no bounds. Rather than embody some hollow girlboss archetype, she learns to use it to her advantage. Meriwether further resists a simplistic good-guys-vs.-bad-guys narrative by demonstrating how petty some of Elizabeth’s most vocal detractors, like Richard, can be.

By establishing who its subject is in early episodes, the show is able to weave in secondary characters, played by an extraordinary ensemble cast, that illustrate why it took more than a decade for Theranos to fail. Desperate to maintain their company’s relevance and gain social capital by partnering with the ostensibly cool tech crowd, a team of insecure, middle-aged Walgreens execs (including Succession ’s Alan Ruck) make a last-minute decision to ignore their many misgivings. Political eminence George Shultz (Sam Waterston) gets taken in by Elizabeth’s patrician background and laudable mission—plus a job opportunity for his grandson (Dylan Minnette). Eventual whistleblower Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-young Kim) initially submits to her superiors’ intimidation because she’s a working-class woman of color who fears being blacklisted. It turns out that the experiences of young women in tech aren’t monolithic.

The Dropout doesn’t escape every docudrama pitfall. It’s too long. It introduces so many characters that it can be hard, particularly if you’re not binging through the show, to keep track of which guys in suits you’re supposed to remember from one episode to the next. The dialogue occasionally errs toward the painfully expository or portentous. (“You don’t get to skip any steps,” Stanford professor Phyllis Gardner, played by the wonderful Laurie Metcalf, admonishes Elizabeth soon before the undergrad drops out to found Theranos.) Yet the show succeeds where it counts—and where just about every other recent series in its lane fails: in creating a character specific and detailed enough in her weirdness to say something new about the real woman.

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The Dropout Hits the Scammer Sweet Spot

What do we want in a show about a scam? This year offers numerous opportunities to ask that question — Inventing Anna , WeCrashed , Super Pumped , Joe vs. Carole — but most of those series leave it unanswered, or answered in the negative (“I don’t know what I want in a scam show, but it’s not this ”). Part of the problem is that the scam show has too many points of appeal, and they’re all achingly obvious. Most of them are about recent, high-profile news stories, so there’s the real-life reenactment factor. They’re stories about money and power and, even better, money and power plus at least one person’s an idiot — sounds like a guaranteed home run! Then there’s the corporate-America aspect of it and the Robin Hood–esque rob-from-the-rich potential. All of them seem like such easy targets to hit. The trouble is that it’s also easy to be sloppy about it, to turn the prime scammer target into something muddled and unsatisfying. Too often, it feels like we’re being insufficiently scammed.

It turns out that what I want in a scam show is The Dropout , Hulu’s new series about Elizabeth Holmes, creator of the blood-testing company Theranos. None of it would work without the lead performance by Amanda Seyfried, who somehow conveys all of Holmes’s eccentricities and tics without begging for laughs or denying their absurdity. Her Holmes has elements of impersonation, but it’s much more an interpretation of the person and her motivations. She is someone who desperately wants success and can’t interrogate that within herself, someone who lacks empathy on the individual level but imagines things on a grand scale of sweeping social improvement, and someone who feels she can be comfortable in the world only if she remakes the world to fit herself.

A key ingredient in the recipe for any scam show is a central figure who has galvanized people’s attention and put on such a successful demonstration of competence that everyone has given them money. But a great scam show needs an element of portraiture to illuminate that principal scammer. If they’re just monsters, or if they’re given flashbacks to backfill motivation and shore up their current predicament, it all fits together too neatly. (There is no more boring form of character development than a straight, bold line drawn from one childhood event to an adult personality.) The Dropout succeeds because of Seyfried’s work as Holmes, but it’s also a messier portrait of Holmes’s youth, one that leads to a much more nuanced and multifaceted image of her by the time Theranos is in full swing.

There are a few framing-device images of Holmes in CEO mode in the introductory episodes — the first three of which premiere this Thursday, followed by a weekly rollout — to remind us where we’re going, but for the most part, the series begins with Holmes as a young woman and then stays there for quite a while, allowing her to be shaped by multiple events and desires. High-school Holmes is already revving her engines for some massive entrepreneurial takeover, a desire she has long before she connects it to any specific area of innovation. She wants to be a huge, famous business-world star. At the same time, The Dropout refuses to oversimplify her ego. She longs for an undeniable position of power and ownership, and, yes, it is born out of both her idolatry of Steve Jobs and the humiliation of seeing her father in a precarious financial situation. It’s also just who she is, in some ineffable and inexplicable way. The Dropout registers this not just through Holmes but also in the way other people react to her: Her colleagues, her teachers, even her parents ping-pong back and forth between adoration and discomfort.

The Dropout ’s Holmes is a careful collage of so many traits. She is cruel and unthinking, driven, insecure, desperate, utterly self-interested, focused; she is also a hilariously basic white kid with her iPod cranked up to 100, singing songs primarily drawn from Apple ads and punching the air in frustration and triumph. The series includes Holmes’s account of being raped in college, and it spends a lot of energy in the relationship between Holmes and Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), her much older boyfriend–business partner–mentor–alleged abuser. All of it helps color Holmes and her world; none of it comes off as an excuse.

That delicate portraiture is where most scam shows falter and where The Dropout really pulls ahead of the competition. It also nails the snowballing sensation of the scam itself, the way Theranos begins as a sincere dream and slowly becomes a pile of lies and manipulation. Even when the house of cards stands tallest, The Dropout is careful to make clear that it’s all still supposedly in service of the admirable dream — it’s just also increasingly divorced from the damage caused by all that faking it until someone figures out how to make it.

The Dropout handles that transition from quixotic hopefulness into nightmarish denial so, so well. At the beginning, it’s almost a coming-of-age story in which the rising drama is less about what’s happening within the company and more about watching Holmes transform into herself. The decision to give us multiple scenes in which Holmes practices and experiments with her bizarre, artificially deep voice is particularly strong. Something that weird and mannered only works when you can see it being built from the ground floor.

This is another area in which The Dropout excels where so many scam shows fall short. It’s not a romp; it’s not a send-up of this goofy, wacky lady with her fake blood-testing and her black turtlenecks. But it’s not a bleak march to destruction, either. There is a perpetual, well-calibrated dance between acknowledging the gravity of this scammy company’s actions and allowing voices within the show to express how ridiculous Holmes has become. Some of that happens with music: The needle drops become a light form of commentary on these characters without tipping over into full, gratuitous winking at the audience. Even more of it happens on the level of the supporting characters, who are taken in by Holmes but also have opportunities to layer in humor. It helps that the supporting cast is all hits, no skips, especially thanks to Andrews, Laurie Metcalf, Stephen Fry, Elizabeth Marvel, LisaGay Hamilton, Kevin Sussman, and Alan Ruck. (This list could honestly have ten more names on it.)

The appeal of a great scam show extends beyond the scam or the show. In almost every instance, they are invitations to examine Americanism more broadly. Which aspect in particular depends a little on the scam: Inventing Anna is more about influencer culture and individual wealth; Joe vs. Carole gets into personal freedoms and the myth of mastery of one’s own domain; The Dropout is one of a trio of new shows about start-up culture, venture capital, and corporatism. But the desire to make that connection explicit often turns into something blunt, inept, or reductive. “Corporations are bad” is hardly news. “Weird people are weird!” is even less so. Without that gesture at something bigger, these shows can feel so hollow.

No scam show to date has negotiated this better than The Dropout . Holmes is idiosyncratic, and Theranos is its own distinct world of catastrophe, but the show also reflects ideas about American individualism and tech culture without making them so overt that it’s distracting. I would love to say that The Dropout is a blueprint for what scam shows should be, but I suspect that, much like a Theranos blood test, its results will be hard to replicate.

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Three reviews of Hulu’s The Dropout, based on your level of Elizabeth Holmes scandal awareness

Can the scammer saga stand out from the pack?

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Most people are familiar with the story (and crimes) of Elizabeth Holmes at this point. After all, the former-Theranos-CEO-and-scammer has been the subject of not only a federal grand jury but two books, two podcasts, two documentaries, an episode of 60 Minutes, and several pieces of investigative journalism. Now, just as she’s been found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors, Holmes’ meteoric rise and fall is also the subject of Hulu’s new miniseries The Dropout .

Such a pipeline is not uncommon these days — this season of TV alone will see a handful of shows like Inventing Anna or WeCrashed , based on stories so grabby they could hardly be contained to a single medium.

And like some of the other projects, The Dropout boasts a lot of big names behind it. Elizabeth Meriwether ( New Girl ) wrote the pilot, with Michael Showalter ( The Eyes of Tammy Faye ) directing more than half the episodes. Amanda Seyfried stars as Elizabeth Holmes, who’s joined by Lost ’s Naveen Andrews, Stephen Fry, Law and Order star Sam Waterston, and Succession ’s Alan Ruck as various members of her brain trust. (Along with plenty more high profile character actors across the seven episodes screened to critics, of eight total.)

But the delay of TV always means betting big on audiences still caring, or a show being able to provide more perspective on a story that might be well-litigated in the public eye by the time it reaches airwaves. Does The Dropout have what it takes? It might depend on how much you’ve engaged with the story so far.

If you know the gist about Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth performing a ribbon cutting in a still from The Dropout

What I know about Elizabeth Holmes basically boils down to a game of scammer Mad Libs: She dressed like Steve Jobs (on purpose?) and did a funny voice. She made an … app? And is in … jail? Hiding? Because it was … bad?

Mostly, I registered her as one of a long line of 2010s grifters-turned-media sensations, the sort that became popular fixations because we love a story where we can’t make up our mind over who the bigger fool is: The scammer in their hubris, or the rich people who let them fly so far over clearly empty promises.

So The Dropout was kind of frustrating for me at first. It’s framed via a deposition of Holmes in 2017, after everything has gone wrong for her — then it’s essentially a biopic delivered piecemeal, speeding through her early life just slowly enough to convey her unusual drive and unorthodox obsession with tech tycoons like Steve Jobs, and stopping to linger at the moments that lead to the formation of her company, Theranos.

This structure presumes you’re familiar with the material in a way that I am not. I did not know what Theranos did , or was supposed to do (ironically, this seems to be a big part of the real-life problem here). It’s not enough to derail me — The Dropout is rather straightforward, like The Social Network but with less style — I just don’t know how I would sell it to anyone who wasn’t already interested in the idea of “an Elizabeth Holmes show.”

Which is a shame because Holmes, as interpreted by Amanda Seyfried, is a marvelous character: sympathetic yet horrible, a moral invertebrate who isn’t without compassion but also willing to compromise on just about anything if the imagined ends seem good enough. Like Seyfried, just about everyone working on The Dropout is turning out stellar work, it’s just unfortunate that the show, like its subject, is wholly given over to tautology. The Dropout is worth your time because Elizabeth Holmes was worth the time of countless writers, podcasters, and documentarians. And Holmes, like most grifters, got that time and money because she simply said she should have it. — Joshua Rivera

If you’re familiar with the basics about Theranos’ implosion

Elizabeth Holmes explaining a trial to a patient in a still from The Dropout

If, like me, you were to have only read the initial headlines about Elizabeth Holmes ( and maybe a stray follow up or shared tidbit from a sister well-versed in the podcast world in the years since), it’s easy to miss just how massive the lies being peddled by Theranos were. John Carryeou’s initial report in the Wall Street Journal is damning, and yet only just the tip of the iceberg.

In the years since, Holmes’ name has been synonymous with a type of obvious fraudster, fraudulent in everything from her blood testing machines to her voice. What I appreciate about The Dropout is the ways it is able (and, sometimes, can’t) pull back on the idea of her crimes being self-evident. Like a would-be advisor admonishing her for quoting Yoda seriously, that’s not really the problem, is it?

As Elizabeth, Seyfried’s performance rarely makes the CEO compelling as a people person; the script does more of the lifting than Seyfried in terms of showcasing Elizabeth as an inspirer of men (and women). Instead what she seems expert at is alternating as a victim and a power player. She is constantly churning the flimflam that can power a bullshit factory like the one Holmes was running: strategically crying in front of her board to keep her CEO seat, or quickly diverting blame to underlings.

It’s a delicate line to walk, certainly, but one that the whole show hinges on. While The Dropout is constantly localizing the impetus for the conspiracy to Holmes and Balwani, it’s careful to show how the structure of the bureaucracy provided cover the same way a funhouse hall of mirrors does. Within the bounds of the scripted drama, it’s hard to know how much of the established fact is even being ginned up.

Which is perhaps the way it should be. What The Dropout is best at is balancing the micro choices Elizabeth and Sunny (the show often localizes the full conspiracy to these two) make for their company with the macro harm of the fallout. Dropout ’s Elizabeth is constantly reminded that she’s an underdog — as a dreamer, a young person, and particularly as a woman. But the show is careful to never excuse them or even allow for a world in which her deceit is anything more than a desperate bid for importance. That can take up a lot of the oxygen in the show, not always unduly. Among the excellent step-by-step play-by-play that the first seven episodes of The Dropout offer is a sense of how a lie this obscene could be supported by so many. More than most reconsiderations of scams it balances the origin of the lie without excusing it. And yet I still have very little sense of the people whose blood was actually on the line — or, frankly, if that comically deep voice was anywhere close to the real thing. — Zosha Millman

If you inhaled every Theranos story you could

Sunny standing behind Elizabeth in their closet as she drinks a green juice in a still from The Dropout

Sometimes when you’re so familiar with a subject, dramatizations of it wind up falling flat since they simply retread a story that you’ve already seen told in better, more interesting ways. However, showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether and director Michael Showalter clearly understood that the point of series like The Dropout isn’t to recreate the reality of what happened beat by beat, but turn these events into art that reflects the essence of that reality.

When Amanda Seyfried’s Holmes dances seductively at a Steve Jobs poster in her teenage bedroom or rubs an iPod all over her face in her college dorm, never for a second did I believe the Silicon Valley entrepreneur actually did these things (though I’d love to be proven wrong). Yet these off-kilter moments perfectly capture Holmes’ famously unsettling presence and her obsession with Jobs. The Dropout clearly isn’t afraid to make on-the-nose creative choices in its dramatization of Holmes’ journey. But with Seyfried’s riveting performance as an anchor, I found myself not caring whether the show landed every swing or delivered a revelatory perspective on the founder; it was just a delight to watch.

Though Seyfried’s Holmes is a charismatic, compelling lead, The Dropout never asks viewers to fully sympathize with her — nor does it let them forget how dangerous the frauds she perpetrated were. As the series progresses, The Dropout dedicates increasing time to its supporting cast, a decision that highlights the scale of those impacted by Holmes’ actions and the very real cost of her con. This is particularly true for the show’s depiction of Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry), Theranos’ chief scientist, who took his own life the night before he was scheduled to testify in court about the company’s “revolutionary” blood-testing tech, which in reality never worked. Fry is absolutely heartbreaking as Gibbons, and delivers one of many outstanding performances from the ensemble cast.

By embracing both the absurdity and gravity of Holmes’ story, The Dropout delivers a stylistic, tightly paced, and at times surprisingly comedic examination of the rise and fall of Theranos. It may not add anything to what I already knew about Holmes, but it doesn’t feel like a predictable rehash of previous reporting, either. At a time ripe with retellings of stranger-than-fiction fraudsters and CEO flameouts , The Dropout stands out as one of the few worth watching — even for those already intimately familiar with the case. — Sadie Gennis

The first three episodes of The Dropout are now airing on Hulu. New episodes drop weekly every Thursday.

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The Dropout review: An overlong Theranos investigation that's somehow too late and too soon

Did you know Elizabeth Holmes liked to dance? Who the hell cares?

Darren is a TV Critic. Follow him on Twitter @DarrenFranich for opinions and recommendations.

Can we make the four-part miniseries a thing? Every limited TV event I've seen lately would benefit from further limiting. Take The Dropout , Hulu's erratic relitigation of the Theranos scandal, which debuts March 3. In the meandering drama, Amanda Seyfried does her best trailer voice as Silicon monster Elizabeth Holmes. It takes three hours to get to the juiciest phase of Holmes' vampiric con job. Things really start to move in episode 7, which must be the worst thing you can read in a TV review.

Seyfried has to play Holmes from teenage ambition through young adult fame and thirtysomething disgrace. It's the lamest structure of soup-to-nuts storytelling, just one damn thing after another, with precious little insight into its confounding central character. Her company promised a medical breakthrough in painless blood testing, offering a full biological readout from one single drop. It was all a lie, though inflated Valley rhetoric might prefer a softer term — "prospective truth," or "theoretically eventual fact." The premiere introduces Elizabeth at every point in her time continuum. Here's the CEO at the magazine-cover apex, barely blinking as she preaches her billion-dollar biotech gospel. Here's the infamous liar caught on tape mid-testimony.

And then The Dropout settles in for a leisurely tour through her personal history, from '90s family melodrama through college into the big money Bay Area tech scene. Elizabeth seems bred into the entrepreneur caste, surrounded by great fortune and potential failure. Her father (Michael Gill) walks home one day to announce he just lost his job at freaking Enron. The family seeks financial assistance from their sorta friend Richard Fuisz ( William H. Macy ), a wealthy man with at least one spare house and a boiling reaction to social slights. Later, in a Mandarin immersion program, Elizabeth meets Sunny Balwani ( Naveen Andrews ), a charismatic brainiac who casually mentions that time he sold his company for 40 million dollars.

For her part, Elizabeth wants to be a billionaire and idolizes Steve Jobs' universe-denting role as a celebrity executive messiah. The first three episodes comprise an Elizabeth Holmes origin story, moving past her time at Stanford to the sleeping-bag-in-the-office phase of her start-up career. Her relationship with Sunny deepens right alongside her devotion to her company. Cheerful biochemist Ian Gibbons ( Stephen Fry ) promises Elizabeth her futuristic vision will come true while reminding her that you can't rush science. Then the money starts running out. More funding is necessary, so the statistics get fuzzy. Phony tests get performed on genuine patients. At a certain point, the truth just seems to stop mattering for the Theranos investors and employees. This thing could be the next Google; who cares if the numbers get pulled out of their anos?

Executive producer Liz Meriwether seems to be trying out different explanations for Holmes' deceit. She has noble ambitions and doesn't want to run out of money. She worries her status as a female CEO amidst the dudebrocracy requires absolute perfection. She actually believes her researchers are perpetually thisclose to a final breakthrough. (A reported campus assault is a pivotal, if somewhat oblique, event in the premiere.) Seyfried's vaguely Vulcan performance prints the legend of Holmes' torpedo intensity, without quite embodying any of these dramatic possibilities. I worry the show underrates the simple possibility that it's fun to get rich and powerful very quickly by telling lies.

I also think the why here is just much less interesting than the what . Theranos snowball rolls into a billion-dollar phenomenon. The company earns institutional credibility. Major corporations and grumpy old men desperately seek Elizabeth's approval. One whole episode focuses on Theranos' courtship of Walgreens; I mean it as a compliment when I say that episode could have been cut down into a very good 5-minute sequence. "I met Rupert Murdoch tonight at the thing!" Elizabeth exclaims at one point, which captures the general screechy-biopic tenor of the dialogue. (Another chestnut: "What are they calling you these days? The millennials?" Even funnier because the person is speaking in 2002.)

Meriwether has a long sitcom track record, and hallowed Wet Hot American Summer Michael Showalter alum directs key episodes. Theranos is certainly a funny story, in a modern-capitalism-is-anti-human sort of way. But The Dropout often uses comedy as a crutch, aiming way too often for that Pam & Tommy tone of needle-drop hysteria. Everyone seems encouraged to go big. Macy looks and acts like a cartoon. I'm not sure watching Elizabeth Holmes dance by herself to pop music really adds to our understanding of her motivations. Her relationship with Sunny is a matter of courtroom ambiguity at this point, though I do think Andrews may just be too dashing to really nail the onscreen character's descent into Orwellian creep.

The show gets better when it shifts focus to the other people caught in the web. Sam Waterston runs his gravitas off a cliff as George Shultz, the Nixon-Reagan grandee who becomes Holmes' sternest defender. Kurtwood Smith is a preening delight as brash mega-lawyer David Boies. Fry is quietly charming and then devastating. Meanwhile, after years of complex lawsuits, Elizabeth's old family friend Richard winds up leading a kind of anti-Theranos superteam, joining forces with skeptical professor Phyllis Gardner (Laurie Metcalf, righteous as ever) while Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) tries to find the truth behind the hype.

The real-life Carreyrou was hounded in every direction. (His boss' boss' boss' boss was, of course, Theranos investor Rupert Murdoch.) Much of the material around him feels overly composited, though. Worth pointing out that Carreyrou wrote the (great) Holmes text Bad Blood . That IP's already claimed for an upcoming Adam McKay movie starring Jennifer Lawrence, which seemed much more enticing before Adam McKay and Jennifer Lawrence ever made a movie together. After so many listless Dropout hours, I have the sense that it may just be too soon and too late for all these new Elizabeth Holmes stories. Time may provide more perspective, but right now her legend is freakshow fodder for podcasts, documentaries, and memes. This blood's gone bad. C

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

Amanda seyfried stars as theranos founder elizabeth holmes.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was a subject of fascination within Silicon Valley and the tech press even before her eventual downfall and recent conviction for defrauding investors . But Hulu’s The Dropout is confident there are still people out there dying to know more about the woman behind the disruptive medtech unicorn that could have been.

Adapted from ABC News’ investigative true crime podcast of the same name hosted by Rebecca Jarvis, and produced by Taylor Dunn and Victoria Thompson, The Dropout chronicles Holmes’ (Amanda Seyfried) journey from being just another Stanford dropout with a half-baked dream to becoming one of the most infamous American CEOs of the 21st century.

Like the podcast, the new Hulu show — which Jarvis, Dunn, and Thompson co-executive produced along with series director Michael Showalter — sets out to both entertain and inform as it lays out a timeline of events beginning in Holmes’ childhood and culminating in 2015 as The Wall Street Journal ’s Theranos reporting began to expose the company’s troubles. Though The Dropout ’s dramatization of past events pulls heavily from the podcast’s reporting, the show is far more comfortable editorializing with a story that somewhat sympathetically frames Holmes not simply as a visionary-turned-fraudster, but also as a woman navigating the treacherous and broadly sexist world of multimillion-dollar tech startups.

Elizabeth Holmes sitting before a Yoda quote mural as she’s about to be interviewed.

Much like Holmes herself, The Dropout is as focused as it is busy. Its first few episodes jump back and forth in time between various moments from Holmes’ past, and in 2017 as she’s being deposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of being charged in 2018 . After opening on Seyfried’s nervous tick-driven Holmes at a point when the public still took the carefully-constructed idea of Elizabeth Holmes, blood wunderkind , at face value, The Dropout tries to make you understand how she got there by zeroing in on important chapters from her past that she carried into the future.

Much like Holmes herself, The Dropout is as focused as it is busy

The Dropout suggests the root of Holmes’ ambition and fixation with money is her relationships with her somewhat overbearing mother Noel (Elizabeth Marvel) and father Chris (Michel Gill), a recently laid-off Enron vice president. As the Holmes family’s pre-Theranos money troubles begin to loom, their uneasy competition with neighbor Richard Fuisz (William H. Macy), a physician and inventor who expresses interest in learning more about Elizabeth’s nascent work, intensifies and The Dropout presents all of these as major data points necessary to understanding the sort of person Holmes becomes.

The true focus of The Dropout is exploring the circumstances of Holmes’ life and her relationships as a commentary on the culture that gave birth to the concept of $1 billion unicorns. The Dropout creates the impression it’s that same culture that pushes Holmes to study abroad in Beijing where she meets Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (Naveen Andrews), a man nearly two decades her senior, with whom she forges an awkward friendship that evolves into an unsettling and sometimes violent romantic and working relationship as the series progresses.

Sunny Balwani and Elizabeth Holmes staring at their reflections in a mirror together.

Though each of The Dropout ’s big plot points is based in reality, because the show weaves them all together into a singular narrative, it can read as the continued mythologization of Holmes — here set to a soundtrack of early-aughts hits like Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead” and Feist’s “1234.”

Fuisz and Balwani are just two of the older, powerful men who come into Holmes’ life either looking to challenge or take advantage of her in some way. And while The Dropout doesn’t depict them as being part of a grand nefarious project working to take Holmes down, it does make a point of highlighting how figures like them have been ever-present in her story. This is what makes The Dropout both somewhat dubious as an account of how Holmes got into a life of white-collar crime, and kind of interesting as a takedown of Silicon Valley itself as it begins to surrender to the Jobsian distortions of reality emanating from Theranos HQ.

The Dropout far more interested in exploring Holmes’ life to comment on Silicon Valley culture

The Dropout takes a good long while before it trains its focus on specific bits of deception and manipulation Holmes used to convince people like Stanford professor Channing Robertson (Bill Irwin), economist George Schultz (Sam Waterston), and biochemist Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry) to trust her. In doing so, the show uses its supporting cast to illustrate the degree to which people were willing to enable Holmes — sometimes knowingly — in order to feel better about themselves or to support causes larger than any of them as individuals, like the push to combat misogyny in tech. Because of this, though, The Dropout often feels as if it’s handling Holmes’ story with kid gloves, and only feels comfortable being critical of her in moments that lend themselves to depicting her as cartoonishly-awkward and inept at interacting with other people.

For all the punches that The Dropout ’s script seems like it’s pulling, Seyfried’s performance hits hard: she churns out a studied barrage of Holmes’ quirks much in the same way that Theranos’ malfunctioning machines spit out blood. Though everyone’s going to be fixated on the sound of Seyfried’s take on Holmes’ voice , what’s infinitely more fascinating (and telling about the show) is how the voice is first introduced, and how it goes on to wax and wane like the Scarlet Witch’s Sokovian lilt . Rather than just speculating about whether Holmes affects her speaking voice, The Dropout presents her tone, as well as her mannerisms and fashion sense, as modular aspects of her identity that she haphazardly learns to swap out in efforts to impress people.

Holmes attending a ribbon cutting ceremony with her new Walgreens partners.

As odd as Seyfried’s Holmes looks and sounds standing in front of a mirror while practicing phrases using the lower register of her speaking voice, The Dropout also tries to underline how that kind of reinvention of the self is something that nearly everyone does — especially those trying to succeed in professional settings where people like them have been historically shut out. Just as the show begins to broach his idea a bit more deeply through its depiction of early Theranos hire Ana Arriola (Nicky Endres), The Dropout sort of drops it in favor portraying all of Holmes’ eccentricities — like lying to investors — as reflexive defenses that spring up in response to pressure and fear .

The Dropout never goes so far as to say that Holmes isn’t responsible for her actions. But it does ask you to wonder with whom culpability lies in an industry where faking it until one makes it is how many successful people have played the game. These are things worth reflecting on, but as you get deeper into The Dropout ’s eight episodes, the show feels increasingly hesitant to let itself and the audience slow down and sit with how bad things became at Theranos under Holmes’ supervision .

When you look at The Dropout as part of the larger constellation of Holmes-related media that’s come out over the past few years, it’s hard to say what exactly the show brings in terms of new insight or clarity into Holmes’ thinking. As a piece of entertainment tailor-made for Hollywood’s current obsession with true crime podcasts shot through with a very two-dimensional strain of white feminism , however, The Dropout makes perfect sense.

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. The series hits Hulu on March 3rd.

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Who is Elizabeth Holmes, exactly? Over the course of the last decade, she’s been a lot of things: Tech genius, business guru, girlboss, pioneer, fraud, con-woman, pariah. When she burst onto the scene as a twentysomething wunderkind and the eccentric leader of multi-billion-dollar medical startup Theranos, her quirks made her feel unique—her baritone voice, penchant for green juice and black turtlenecks, and unblinking, thousand-yard stare simply read as the Jobs-ian tics of your average Silicon Valley trailblazer. Then, of course, we learned it was all a lie: Theranos wasn’t the revolutionary blood-testing miracle it was advertised to be, and Holmes wasn’t a prophet. (And, according to rumor, that characteristic voice is also a fake.)

“The Dropout,” Hulu’s latest contribution to the streaming world’s current glut of limited series about doomed startups and con artists (see also: Netflix’s “ Inventing Anna ,” Showtime’s “ Super Pumped ,” et al.), falls prey to many of this nascent subgenre’s failings. It’s too long and convoluted by half, and sometimes drops a couple of balls when juggling its oversized ensemble cast. But one thing that show creator Elizabeth Meriwether (“New Girl”) and director of the first four episodes, Michael Showalter (“ The Eyes of Tammy Faye ”), understand about Holmes’ story is that it’s innately ridiculous that people fell for her schtick in the first place. And when “The Dropout” becomes more interested in Holmes as an antagonist in America’s story than the protagonist of her own, the miniseries shines a little bit brighter.

Running parallel to other nonfiction accounts of Holmes’ rise and fall ( Alex Gibney ’s revelatory “ The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley ”) but chiefly based on the ABC News podcast of the same name, “The Dropout” starts as an underdog biopic of Holmes ( Amanda Seyfried ) before unfurling into a broader indictment of the circumstances that led to Theranos in the first place. We first see her as a kooky, outcast, overachieving chemical engineering student at Stanford, not yet the low-voiced weirdo of her adulthood but still with a Cheshire-cat smile and absurdly-scheduled life plan. “I’m planning on being sexually active in college,” she matter-of-factly tells her mom, before practicing her sorority-girl “woo”s in the mirror. Flashbacks show her as a gangly grade-schooler, determined to run to the finish line in gym class even though she’s laps behind in last place. She’s the daughter of an Enron executive (Michel Gill), witnessing the fallout of her father’s career due to corporate fraud firsthand. One gets the impression that the lesson she took from that wasn’t not to lie; it was to not get caught.

Still, inspired by the jeans-and-turtleneck vibes of Steve Jobs and her own impatient lust for greatness, Holmes drops out of Stanford as soon as she imagines a one-of-a-kind idea for a mobile blood-test machine and finds a lover/benefactor ( Naveen Andrews ’ wily, menacing Sunny Balwani) who can bankroll her dream. The problem, of course, is that her idea is literally ahead of its time: the technology isn’t there, as a cadre of benefactors ( Bill Irwin ’s Stanford prof and Theranos board member Channing Robertson) and exhausted Theranos scientists ( Utkarsh Ambudkar , James Hiroyuki Liao) are wont to tell her. Years pass, and no number of tests and modifications will make it work.

But the ever-consuming monster of startup capital demands progress, so Holmes makes it work the only way she can: by bamboozling one high-profile investor after another with her aspirational language and uncanny affect. It’s these stretches in which “The Dropout” offers Seyfried the most room to play as Holmes, and it’s a terrific, transformative performance. The role originally went to Kate McKinnon , whom I fear would play it too overtly comic, too in on the joke. Seyfried, on the other hand, gets the innate absurdity of Holmes as a person but also understands that she’s the hero of her own story. It’s impersonation, to be sure, but the innate performativity of Holmes herself smooths over those bug-eyed tics to make them an organic part of the character. After all, Holmes is a weird woman, who slathered on even weirder affectations to keep the old white businessmen she was hypnotizing off-balance.

But frustratingly, a lot of “The Dropout” can’t match Seyfried’s hell-for-leather frequency, chiefly due to how much they have to stretch out events to fit the show’s eight-hour runtime. (Seven episodes were provided for review.) The first three episodes teeter dangerously towards apologia for Holmes’ misdeeds, characterizing her as driven by past traumas or lost in the thrall of her pseudo-abusive domestic relationship with Sunny—the same mid-aughts #girlboss posturing that allowed her to pull the wool over the eyes of so many well-meaning investors and pundits. Meriwether and the writers make the critical mistake of trying to answer the question, “Who is Elizabeth Holmes?” when they should really be asking, “ Why Elizabeth Holmes?”

Episode four (“Old White Men”) comes closest to entertaining that latter question, as we skip ahead to a post-recession 2010, when Theranos is courting retail healthcare pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens to host “wellness centers” across the globe. Finally, we escape Holmes’ point of view to follow a gaggle of hapless, late-middle-age Walgreens execs trying to size her up and figure out whether Theranos is the real deal. Alan Ruck ’s Jay Rosan is perplexed by the company, but pays himself on the back for elevating a female CEO; Josh Pais ’ Wade Miquelton is even more dubious, but wary of missing out on a miracle startup because “they’re the only thing making money right now.” Showalter frequently frames them in wide shots huddled in front of buildings or dashing between cars, leaning hard into the innate farce of the whole thing—a creaky economic world terrified by enticed by the promise of the new, even if it all might be smoke. Turns out that, even for American capitalism’s top minds, FOMO is far too enticing to ignore.

“The Dropout” occasionally understands that the real appeal of Elizabeth Holmes’ story isn’t what makes her tick, but how she leveraged America’s love of narrative into a smoke-and-mirrors success story. And at its best, it uses a cavalcade of incredible supporting players to convey that tantalizing conflict between cold, hard facts and the buzzy, fuzzy success story Holmes sold everybody. William H. Macy (in a balding prosthetic so huge it looks like that Nic-Cage-in-"Next" hair meme ) is a standout as patent hound and sputtering Holmes nemesis Richard Fuisz, who takes his pursuit of Holmes all the way through a messy divorce. The same goes for Stephen Fry ’s kind, hapless Ian Gibbons, the principled scientist whose faith in Holmes’ work eventually (and tragically) traps him between nondisclosure agreements and a federal subpoena. Sam Waterston and Michael Ironside both shine as, respectively, US Secretary of State George P. Schultz and initial Theranos VC Don Lucas, both men hoping to launder their legacy by helping a nice, pretty young blonde woman save the world. The cast expands even further as the show blazes through the years and zeroes in on different perspectives, eventually landing on Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou (a sedate Ebon Moss-Bachrach ) as the show reaches the inevitable “ Spotlight ” portion of the proceedings.

But for all the individual highlights “The Dropout” offers, it fails to cohere into a streamlined whole, which is more than a little frustrating. For every scene where the writers grow ever closer to the point—tech startups are an enormous house of cards that the right person can exploit through big promises and, in the case of Holmes, identity politics—there are three that waste time picking at Holmes’ inscrutable outer crust, only to find little underneath the surface. It’s the kind of psychologically-hollow character a superb actress like Seyfried can make a true meal out of, and other game actors can bounce off beautifully. All that’s missing is a little more economy of storytelling, and a consistent angle to take on the whole Theranos fiasco. As is, it feels like a vial of blood spinning in a centrifuge: full of possibility, but a bit dizzying to watch.

Seven episodes screened for review .

Clint Worthington

Clint Worthington is a Chicago-based film/TV critic and podcaster. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Spool , as well as a Senior Staff Writer for Consequence . He is also a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and Critics Choice Association. You can also find his byline at RogerEbert.com, Vulture, The Companion, FOX Digital, and elsewhere.

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‘The Dropout’ Review: The Wild Theranos Fraud Story Gets a Largely Straightforward Account

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“ The Dropout ” operates under no delusion of where Elizabeth Holmes ends up. Even if the saga of meteoric health tech startup Theranos wasn’t a ubiquitous, high-profile headline fascination of the last decade, the new Hulu series dramatizing the rise and fall of the company opens with a glimpse of that latter half. There’s Holmes (deftly played here by Amanda Seyfried ), Theranos CEO, answering to federal investigators about what she knew about her company’s elaborate smokescreen, one that brought in billions of dollars before flaming out on the biggest stage possible.

Only, like Holmes herself, “The Dropout” is elusive in how much it actually answers. When presented with a basic overview of the Theranos story — an aspiring corporate wunderkind pitches a revolutionary idea about blood testing that was never really going to work the way she claimed it would — the lingering question is still a basic one: “Why?” What reason would someone have for staking global attention and a 10-figure growth of their bank account on something provably false? “The Dropout” doesn’t have an easy answer there, but the best parts of this eight-episode series succeed more as an emotional and tonal approximation of the inside of the Theranos bubble rather than a play-by-play retelling of actual events.

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It’s easy to see why that second option would be tempting. As depicted in the podcast that gives this TV series its title, and first in the accounts of Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, Theranos’ conception in the public has arced in a way that’s pretty easily translatable to the screen. At the outset, Holmes’ corporate ambitions take her away from her freshman year at Stanford. Her personal relationship with investor Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews) becomes a romantic partnership and a business one, in that order. Initial speedbumps in the company give way to a steady expansion of VC money and an eye-grabbing collection of public backers. And then, in spectacular fashion, the entire illusion shatters into smaller and smaller pieces.

For the most part, “The Dropout” doesn’t stray too far from that path. The respective synopses for the public account of events and for this show have a fairly broad overlap. Showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether, along with Michael Showalter directing the first handful of episodes, does manage to inject a little bit of distinct DNA, staging a few impromptu dance parties and Holmes’ own personal transformations amidst Theranos’ early days. Much of what surrounds those is an entertaining if workmanlike checklist of the major checkpoints along an already documented path.

The Dropout -- “Flower of Life” - Episode 105 -- With the Walgreens deadline looming, Elizabeth and Sunny scramble to find solutions to their technological failures. Ian is drawn into Elizabeth’s lawsuit against Richard. Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried), shown. (Photo by: Beth Dubber/Hulu)

The closest that “The Dropout” gets to shaking up its own narrative ambition — aside from an early moment more Sméagol than Steve Jobs — is its fourth episode. After being locked into Holmes and Balwani’s ambitions (and the churn of people caught in that wake), “The Dropout” spends an episode largely on the other side of the corporate table, embedded with a subset of the Walgreen’s corporate braintrust. As one of the potential suitors for the retail side of the Theranos business plan, the Walgreen’s cadre of decision-makers gives this show a thin veneer of farce that’s largely absent elsewhere.

“The Dropout” rightfully considers the privacy and health implications of this company’s decisions, ones that had real-life consequences for both employees and an untold number of patients who relied on faulty test results. But the parts of the show that ring truest center more on the inanity of corporate crystal ball gazing than the ominous curdling of Holmes’ empty “change the world” ethos. In an ecosystem where fortunes are made on speculation and moving around theoretical assets, Holmes is the perfect dramatic centerpiece for someone who for a time made obfuscation a viable business model. Watching Seyfried’s Holmes retreat into a protective cocoon, whether on a private plane or tucked out of sight behind her office desk, is the closest that “The Dropout” comes to understanding how Holmes was able to push things as far as she did.

So the most effective parts of “The Dropout” aren’t the ones drenched in dread or foreboding, but the ones in which the people driving the Theranos bus are shown to be ignorant, willfully or otherwise. That ignorance is initially part of Sunny’s presumed charm, his willingness to push Theranos to its stated goals, evidence be damned. Even while putting on a wide smile for whoever Sunny’s intended audience is, Andrews is sharp at keeping the potential of a more manipulative side simmering. The performance comes to life in a slew of office showdowns, but “The Dropout” finds a more interesting way to represent what that character means to the overall story when he’s seen berating employees from behind soundproof glass walls.

Yet, despite those occasional strengths, one of the reasons that “The Dropout” ultimately loses steam toward the back half of the season is that Holmes is fundamentally more interesting as an enigma. Her abrupt conversation switches, her fixation on tiny details, and (yes, of course) the changes in her speaking voice became the parts that stuck out most in the podcast, in Carreyrou’s telling, and in any other iteration of this story. That’s mainly because even people in positions to shed light on those odd, seemingly unmotivated decisions couldn’t explain them either.

The Dropout -- “Old White Men” - 104 -- Walgreens is enticed by Elizabeth to seal the deal on a new partnership with Theranos. Ian tries to investigate what's going on behind closed doors. Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry) and Cynthia (Syra McCarthy), shown. (Photo by: Beth Dubber/Hulu)

So “The Dropout” reaches for slivers of paranoid thriller, high-stakes financial drama, and boardroom farce without fully cashing in on the best parts of either. In the absence of “The Dropout” having much to add to the existing perception of Holmes, it’s up to Seyfried to do some a lot of the heavy lifting. In doing so, she wisely navigates that middle ground between Holmes’ initial public branding as the premier 2010s girlboss and the competing perception of her as a spoiled sociopath who refused to accept any version of “no.” The biggest decision that “The Dropout” makes is to paint Holmes as someone more prone to self-delusion than maliciousness.

Still, even if its depiction of the journalistic process (Carreyrou, played here by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, becomes a major late-season player) or the lab development of the in-house Theranos technology feels a tad oversimplified at points, this story is too compelling for this series to be anything other than watchable. And no series with this ensemble could be anywhere close to inert, even if some of these roles feel straight out of a podcast listener’s fancasting wishes. (Laurie Metcalf as the Stanford professor who saw through the facade from the start! Kurtwood Smith as the company’s A-list attorney! Sam Waterston as former Defense Secretary George Schulz!)

Two real strengths from the supporting cast represent the ideal balance that “The Dropout” finds at various points throughout its runtime. As early Theranos employee Ian Gibbons, Stephen Fry strikes the perfect combination between someone genuinely wanting to do good and then devastated when that dream begins to curdle in real time. And as Gibbons’ obverse, in-house legal counsel Linda Tanner, the always-reliable Michaela Watkins locates that eerie intersection between absurdity and menace that made Theranos a company that people were willing to risk their careers and massive lawsuits to expose.

A few time-capsule needle drops and winking references to a tech world gone by (“What’s ‘UberCab?’”) have the same kind of mixed results the overall series does. Some offer genuine pathways to a particular mindset at a particular point in time. Others are window-dressing for a version of a show rooted in transposing a story from one longform storytelling vehicle to another. The good news is that, either way, this is a tale that even in its most straightforward telling still has plenty to latch on to.

The first three episodes of “The Dropout” premiere Thursday, March 3 on Hulu. One additional episode will be available weekly for the remainder of the season.

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‘The Dropout’: Amanda Seyfried nails Elizabeth Holmes, but series still clouds her mystery

What fresh hell it must be working at a tech startup.

At least, that’s the way movies and TV series depict it, from as far back to “The Social Network,” my favorite film of 2010, to Showtime's new “ Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber ." Most of them focus on hyper-driven visionaries, who have no time for such niceties as decent human behavior, embarking on a quest to get their ideas to market. They make millions, even billions, while losing their soul and, not for nothing, friends and family along the way.

Dramatizing these true-life stories presumably gives us a glimpse of the humanity of these creators, as well as some background on why they behave the way they do.

The latest in this line is “The Dropout,” (★★ ½ out of four), an eight-part series about Elizabeth Holmes now streaming weekly on Hulu.

Amanda Seyfried stars as Elizabeth Holmes

Holmes founded Theranos and was recently convicted of lying to the company’s investors, which is only a spoiler if you haven’t looked at a newspaper or website in the last couple of years. “The Dropout,” based on the ABC News podcast, follows the typical pattern of the other tech stories in some respects, but it’s got a big asset in its favor: Amanda Seyfried. She absolutely nails the mysterious – some would say affected and others weird – aura Holmes presents, from her look to her voice to the maniacal devotion to her work.

And after the seven episodes Hulu provided for review, Holmes still remains something of a mystery.

The series begins with Holmes’ deposition, which gives you a pretty major hint of the direction and frames some of the episodes, which otherwise proceed in chronological order through Holmes’ life.

Her mom (Elizabeth Marvel) is a passive-aggressive sort who clearly intends to micromanage Elizabeth’s life. That doesn’t really work out. Holmes is driven from the start – she wants to be a billionaire.

The story of Holmes and her startup, Theranos

She goes to Stanford, where she manages to get into graduate courses as a freshman. She has no social life – that won’t change – but goes to a party and is raped. The school takes no action, and she drops out, though not because of that (or not just because of that, she says). She convinces her parents to invest her tuition money in the company she's starting, Theranos.

Holmes has hit upon an idea: a machine that will test a patient’s blood, using a single drop. The idea will go through some alterations and the technology definitely will, but that remains the goal. Holmes manages to convince a lot of people to give her a lot of money; the board includes George Schultz (Sam Waterston), who served as the U.S. secretary of State and secretary of the Treasury. His influence is crucial.

His grandson Tyler (Dylan Minnette) will be even more important to the story. He works in the lab at Theranos; he and Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-Young Kim) know what the investors do not: Namely, that the technology doesn’t work.

Which doesn’t stop Theranos from deploying the tests, including in several Walgreens stores in Arizona . That real patients received inaccurate test results doesn’t seem to faze Holmes. Luckily, other people around her had more of a conscience, including Tyler Schultz and Cheung.

Naveen Andrews is a jerk as Holmes' romantic partner

Early on, Holmes meets Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), who works with her and becomes her romantic partner. Holmes testified that Balwani tried to control her life, down to what she ate and wore, and there’s some of that here.

But mostly he’s just a jerk, which (it is implied and even stated) someone has to be to keep moving forward with tech startups. Whether that’s true is debatable – one hopes not. But there’s plenty of it going on at Theranos.

Holmes grows increasingly evasive and eventually downright deceptive about the technology as she tries to lure investors – and keep the ones she’s got. Alan Ruck brings a lot of his goofball “ Succession ” energy to the role of a Walgreens doctor desperate to believe in Holmes, as were so many.

But Holmes cuts more people out of her life and the company, including chemist Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry, excellent), a move that will prove fateful.

Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is on the trail of the fraud, and at least gives the audience someone to root for.

Executive producer and showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether keeps the science relatively simple. It’s Seyfried’s performance that’s complex, if at times indecipherable. But maybe that’s an accurate portrayal of Holmes. She is driven to a fault, incapable of accepting anything but winning. What winning entails among so much loss and lying, however, remains a mystery.

The Dropout Review: The Downfall of Elizabeth Holmes

Amanda Seyfried stars as Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu's The Dropout, a bildungsroman on her life before crime.

On January 3, 2022, entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of four out of eleven charges in an American court. She was formerly the Chief Executive Officer of Theranos, a company that claimed to revolutionize blood testing by utilizing a single fingerprick to examine blood. This led to Holmes topping a Forbes list of the wealthiest self-made women in the United States, or until the truth rose to the surface. Holmes was involved in an elaborate fraud scheme where she was purposely misleading investors and the government to receive funding. The four charges mentioned previously were all for wire fraud and lying to investors about the company’s technology. Holmes now faces the potential of spending twenty years in prison.

If there is anything noticeable about television trends lately, it is this: women are deeply involved in true crime, too. Netflix’s Inventing Anna would delve into the true story of fake heiress Anna Delvey, while Elle Fanning’s much-anticipated Hulu series The Girl from Plainville will retell the story of Michelle Carter . The Dropout answers to this trend trying to disguise itself as a show laced with dark humor, but instead comes across as a dramatized documentary.

Three years before Holmes’ fate would be decided, in 2019, Hulu ordered a miniseries about her story. Originally anticipated to be between six and ten episodes, it would be based on the 2019 podcast The Dropout , which is where the television series received its name. Amanda Seyfried was cast as Elizabeth Holmes in 2021 after the first choice, Kate McKinnon, left the project. The show’s lineup includes Naveen Andrews as Sunny Balwani, Holmes’ significant other and partner in crime, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Michael Gill, Bill Irwin, and Laurie Metcalf, among many other big names.

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Humble Origins

The opening scene immediately sets the tone. While Seyfried sits in front of a camera, fully in character and playing Holmes, she is interviewed about her company and career by a journalist. “What is the best word to describe you?” She hesitates then gives a small smile. “Mission-oriented,” she responds after a beat. She is in a hurry for glory, and in the next scene, we have an inkling why: her father lost his job due to—ironically—the company committing fraud.

Before the show delves into the world she has created with her company, it establishes itself in the past, where she is about to attend Stanford University and prepares to study abroad in Beijing, China. This cuts back and forth between scenes at her trial, as she is questioned about her company and motives Holmes is cast in this Shakespearean tragedy as the ambitious go-getter limited by who she is surrounded by. On her study abroad program, she tries to speak to her fellow students in Mandarin Chinese, but they laugh, snort, and tell her to speak English. Holmes knows what she is doing, despite her youthfulness, and that is what attracts her to Sunny: he sees her for who she is.

At a meeting with a wealthy family friend, she confidently says she is going to go to Stanford, build up a company, and become a billionaire. Unamused, the male family friend postures and asserts that she must think that she is much smarter than him. And perhaps that is the irony behind Holmes’ situation: she has too much confidence in her façade to the point where she may even believe in it. As she rehearses her lines and makes faces in the mirror, this is merely becoming a character for her. She is so driven and ambitious to the point where she stubbornly will not give up, which is her downfall at the end of the day. It is a toxic relationship she has with her motivations, as well as the relationship she has with Sunny.

Navigating a Male-Dominated Industry

One of the most interesting and critical parts about The Dropout is how it portrays the world of startups in the mid-2000s and early 2010s. It begins with Sunny, the man twice her age who does not seem to have innocent intentions when he meets Holmes, a girl who just graduated from high school. At Stanford, she is sexually assaulted, leading to another turn of events ridden with trauma, and she has to constantly prove her worth and intelligence to the men around her. The sexism and discrimination of being a woman follow her with every business decision even when she drops out of Stanford to start her company,

It seems incredulous that a young woman can create such an empire at this age, especially in a male-dominated industry. And maybe there is an underlying motivation set up for her to fail. Successful women in business are rare due to the conditions they live and work in, and so when someone does make it to the top lingering resentment is there just because she is a woman who made it.

While other true-crime shows and movies may have leanings for sympathizing with their subject, The Dropout is straightforward in its approach and does not try to make it seem like what Holmes did was right. She successfully evaded being caught for her fraud for over a decade, and while she did succeed in her dream of making it as a billionaire, it did not last for very long. Holmes came from a wealthy family, a fact glossed over in the show. She was capable of dropping out of Stanford due to her family’s financial support, although the show sets it up to seem as if the family is going to hit rock bottom when her father loses his job.

There is also an underlying commentary about the American Dream going on here. Often it is uttered that when one works hard and relentlessly towards their dreams, they will eventually make and manifest everything they want possible. That is not what happens here in The Dropout . Although Holmes already had the privilege of coming from a well-to-do family and attending Stanford University, she chased after her dream hard and fast to the point of becoming corrupt to succeed. Business is unfortunately not always clean, but Holmes is merely one of many stories revealed openly about unethical practices. And because of that, she never truly accomplished what she set out to do.

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An All-Star Ensemble Cast

To prepare for her role, Seyfried had to master one of Holmes’ signature characteristics: her deep voice. Many have speculated it to have been fake for years, yet another construct in Holmes’ master plan, and the show chooses to go this route. Seyfried weaves the deeper voice in specific contexts, such as when she is around a lot of men. It is moments like these where a stark juxtaposition against Holmes’ real attitude and appearance tells a different, underlying story. She is a woman desperate to succeed in the cutthroat business world, even if it means altering certain personal aspects, mythologizing herself with the deep voice, black turtleneck, and red lips. If it is what it takes to succeed, she is willing to do anything, and she does.

Amanda Seyfried, who has been nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Mank , weaves in the different parts of Holmes’ story seamlessly. Her portrayal has many layers to it, from the awkward teenage girl befriending a man twice her age to the young female CEO entering the cutthroat world of Silicon Valley startups. The viewer cannot help but cringe when she seriously quotes Yoda to a stone-faced chemistry professor (Laurie Metcalf), who then decides that she can longer trust anyone who quotes Star Wars in her lab. While McKinnon was once intended for the role of Holmes, it seems that Seyfried was a good replacement, as she nails it and evokes a sense of what the story wants you to take away from it.

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The ensemble cast in The Dropout provides a set of cohesive performances that makes this story particularly gripping. The show’s linear storytelling and cast set up Holmes to be this awkward, intelligent, but remarkable antihero that manages to deceive everyone for years about technology that did not work. There is skepticism interjected with the awe and wonder for what she has done, and this is what makes a good story. After the viewer follows her origin story, building sympathy for her situation and what she has experienced, this is torn away through her decisions. It is an inner look at the university dropouts who want to make it big in the business world, but fall to their own ambition.

The Dropout is a limited series, so it is only eight episodes long and has a run time of eight hours. The first three episodes have already been released, while the remaining episodes will be dropping weekly every Thursday. The Dropout is currently available to stream on Hulu.

The Dropout review : Elizabeth Holmes drama isn't as good as the true story

An all-star cast makes this overblown show an Emmy contender.

We’re in the middle of a Scam Rennaissance . While there’s nothing like a story of a good grift, recently all sorts of real-life scams have overtaken the streaming scene. The Tinder Swindler and Inventing Anna , both streaming on Netflix, told the story of real people tricked by a charismatic, mysterious figure.

Hulu’s entry into this trending topic is The Dropout , a dramatization of Elizabeth Holmes’ rise and fall as the CEO of Theranos based on the podcast of the same name. But while Netflix’s scam stories only affected a handful of people, Theranos had the potential to falsely diagnose countless patients.

The Dropout considers this aspect with deep gravity but balances it out with ridiculous moments that undercut the inherent quirks of the enigmatic Elizabeth Holmes.

Amanda Seyfried recreates Elizabeth Holmes’ infamous voice with a dedication and reverence usually accompanied by a lecture about “Method” acting. The series begins before Elizabeth even graduates high school, where she is given the classic “underdog” treatment. She’s misunderstood in her single-minded dream to change the world. A prominent female professor (played by the inimitable Laurie Metcalf) doesn’t believe in her, and she’s written off because of her age.

The show suddenly manifests the few people who do believe in Elizabeth. Before the end of the premiere episode, she is about to drop out of Stanford and forge ahead with a new company with a singular vision: to test for hundreds of diseases with only a few drops of blood.

If the first episode were to stand on its own, it would be a fabulous rags-to-riches story. Well, upper-middle-class-to-riches. But the truth is much more complicated. Though the audience is given every opportunity to root for Elizabeth Holmes, as it attempts to humanize her with an underdog story. However, it gets harder to root for her with every subsequent episode.

The Dropout review hulu amanda seyfried naveen andrews elizabeth holmes

Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes and Naveen Andrews as Sunny Balwari in The Dropout .

Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews) and British biochemist Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry) are the proverbial angel and devil on her shoulders. Ian coaches Elizabeth through the science, and Sunny Balwani keeps her business-mind shrewd (and her romantic life busy).

But while the star-studded cast keeps the emotions crackling, there’s an uncanny nature to how the show dramatizes the true story of Theranos. In The Inventor , the HBO documentary following Theranos, one of the biggest moments of levity comes from Elizabeth dancing awkwardly to “Celebrate Good Times” by Kool & the Gang. In The Dropout , Elizabeth is constantly jamming out to the hits of that year as a way to establish the setting — and it’s nowhere near as awkward as Elizabeth’s real dance moves.

One of the most egregious signs of this story trying to be a “Prestige TV” series is how it uses Yoda from Star Wars. It’s well known Theranos HQ had a large mural reading with the Yoda quote, “DO OR DO NOT — THERE IS NO TRY,” but The Dropout makes Yoda a strange sort of talisman in her life. Symbols of the iconic Jedi character pop up onscreen throughout the series as if Yoda is following her through her rise and fall.

The infamous Yoda wall in Theranos HQ as depicted by The Dropout .

Much like The Act, Hulu’s other based-on-a-true-story drama series, The Dropout takes a story that’s already difficult to believe and then muddies it with manufactured drama. That said, the acting is sublime, and like The Act, it’s sure to pick up its fair share of Emmys. (Seyfried’s contralto is enough to secure her a win.)

But is that enough to make for an enjoyable watch? At best, The Dropout is a companion piece to the podcast it's based on — and the countless other non-fiction works surrounding the story. By supplementing the drama with the facts, you can discern the truth from the embellishments and realize there’s far more in column A than column B.

If the story is already this unbelievable, do we really need to add more?

The Dropout premieres March 3 on Hulu.

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The Dropout review: Elizabeth Holmes drama lacks subtlety but is more viable than anything Theranos ever produced

Amanda seyfried deftly conveys the brittleness of holmes’s fake-it-till-you-make-it demeanour, but the series is slightly let down by foreshadowing, blunt symbolism, article bookmarked.

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One thread of ‘The Dropout’ is the troubled romance between Seyfried’s Holmes, and the much older businessman, Sunny Balwani, played by Lost ’s Naveen Andrews

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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.

The other thread is the troubled romance between Seyfried’s Holmes, and the much older businessman, Sunny Balwani, played by Lost ’s Naveen Andrews. He’s clever, charming and rich, but creepily obsessed with this charismatic teenage girl he meets on a Mandarin exchange programme. It’s Balwani’s personal tragedy, the death of his father after failed diagnostics, that inspires Holmes, as does his tendency to rationalise the obsessive pursuit of money. “Nobody thinks you’re a terrorist when you drive a Lamborghini,” he tells her.

Seyfried manages to convey the brittleness of Holmes’s fake-it-till-you-make-it demeanour, and copes admirably with the challenge of bringing the character from adolescence through to adulthood. She also has a doe-eyed innocence that speaks to the series’ most complex question: was Holmes actually a victim? Is this one of those villain origin stories, much loved in Hollywood of late, where benign ambitions and real grievances lead a person astray? “I don’t want to be president, I want to be a billionaire,” she tells her family. “It’s not just about the money,” Holmes says, “you have to have a purpose.” Orbiting around Seyfried’s central performance is an all-star cast: William H Macy, terrifying, as inventor Richard Fuisz; Laurie Metcalf, reliably stern, as pharmacologist Phyllis Gardner; and Stephen Fry, avuncular, as the doomed biochemist Ian Gibbons.

The subtlety of The Dropout ’s position on Holmes is not matched by the subtlety of the show in any other department. It has all the smoothed down edges of an iMac, or an Edison machine. In one early scene, the teenage Holmes dances to Alabama’s “I’m in a Hurry (And Don’t Know Why)” while staring at a poster of Steve Jobs. In another, Holmes and Balwani, quite literally, burn some money, igniting it in a semi-spiritual process, a sequence so on-the-nose it might as well be a pair of pince-nez.

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Later scenes involve Holmes being led further astray, by the corrupting influences of power and money (at one point, she stands on the bow of a yacht owned by Oracle’s Larry Ellison, played by Hart Bochner, and the two of them yell “get the f***ing money!” at the waves) and the increasingly overbearing Balwani. Despite interlacing episodes with testimony from Holmes’s eventual deposition, especially when it contrasts with the truth of the drama as it plays out for us, the show is at times conspicuously economical with what it does, and does not, render on-screen. Some incidents, such as Holmes’s claim that she was raped in college, are played deliberately ambiguously. But others, such as her allegations of assault against Balwani, are presented in a clearer light. The result is a sense that the show isn’t playing quite as fair as it thinks it is.

The final product is, ultimately, more viable than anything Theranos ever produced. Anchored by Seyfried’s charmingly vulnerable central performance, and assisted by the comedy chops of executive producers like New Girl ’s Elizabeth Meriwether and Search Party ’s Michael Showalter, at its best it feels like The Wolf of Wall Street , if Jordan Belfort were replaced by Paris Geller. But all too often the temptation for foreshadowing, blunt symbolism, or the skewering of LinkedIn babble, gets in the way of this being an effective human drama.

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Fallout First Reviews: A 'Violent, Fun, Emotional, Epic' Video Game Adaptation, Critics Say

Critics say prime video's new series benefits from strong storytelling, committed performances, and a deft balance of tone, making it one of the best video game adaptations ever..

TAGGED AS: First Reviews , streaming , television , TV

Fallout is the latest video game adaptation to hit the small screen. Created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner , and executive produced by Westworld ‘s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy , the eight episode series, inspired by the hit game franchise from Bethesda Softworks drops on Wednesday, April 10 to Amazon Prime Video.

The post-apocalyptic series stars Ella Purnell as Lucy; Aaron Moten as Maximus; and Walton Goggins as The Ghoul. Joining them is an ensemble cast that includes Kyle MacLachlan , Sarita Choudhury , Michael Emerson , Leslie Uggams , Zach Cherry , Moises Arias and Johnny Pemberton , among others.

With nearly three decades of lore under its belt, the video game franchise has drawn a massive fanbase. Needless to say, there’s a lot of hype surrounding the new series. Does it live up to expectations? Here’s what critics are saying about Fallout :

How does it compare to the video games?

Prime Video’s TV adaptation of Fallout does something the games in the legendary franchise never have—put storytelling above all else. — Bernard Boo, Den of Geek

Fallout is the new standard for video game adaptations. This series is violent, fun, emotional, epic, and just plain awesome. — Alex Maidy, JoBlo’s Movie Network

Opting for a new narrative that simply takes place in the Fallout world, the series is a mix of adventure and puzzle-box mystery, with more than enough action scenes to satisfy the RPG faithful. It’s fun, and only occasionally overcomplicated. — Kelly Lawler, USA Today

Fallout takes the ideas of the games and crafts its own story in an already interesting world. Nails the satire, the wackiness, and about everything a fan could want. — Zach Pope, Zach Pope Reviews

Bodies fly, heads explode, and video game logic reigns triumphant. — Niv M. Sultan, Slant Magazine

How is the cast?

(Photo by Prime Video)

All of the performances are great; Purnell is a strong, loveably naive lead, while Moten delivers a fascinatingly, sort-of loathsome turn. Excusing the wonderful pooch that plays CX404, aka Four, Goggins is the runaway MVP, an agent of chilly, smooth-talking chaos somewhere between John Marston and Clarence Boddicker. — Cameron Frew, Dexerto

“I hate it up here,” Lucy mutters early on, and given the horrors to which she’s subjected, nobody could blame her. Yet her quest not only involves no shortage of carnage but also insights into her community and its origins, as well as encounters (some relatively brief) with a strong array of co-stars, including Moisés Arias, Kyle MacLachlan, Sarita Choudhury, Michael Emerson, and Leslie Uggams. — Brian Lowry, CNN

The Ghoul serves as the perfect foil for Lucy and Maximus, with Goggins deploying megatons’ worth of weary charisma in his performance as Fallout’ s resident lone wolf, black hat archetype. — Belen Edwards, Mashable

Emancipation’s Aaron Moten and And Just Like That… standout Sarita Choudhury nail the determined, world-weary drive that propels their characters forward while Justified’ s Walton Goggins gives one of his best performances yet as Cooper Howard, a mutated ghoul of a gunslinger who gives everyone a hard time with biting quips and searing bullet work. — David Opie, Digital Spy

How’s the writing and world-building?

The show’s creators have done such an impeccable job fleshing out the world of Fallout that it feels like the characters are treading stories and quests you’ve experienced yourself in one way or another. — Tanner Dedmon, ComicBook.com

Story-wise, Fallout smartly eschews trying to adapt specific storylines or side-quests from any of the games, but rather concocts a new one set in the rich and familiar landscape. — Brian Lloyd, entertainment.ie

There are plenty of Easter eggs, as you might expect from a video game adaptation, but Fallout manages to make them seem like part of the world, too. It all feels real and believable as pieces of a whole existence that these people have scraped together, which goes a long way toward helping the show’s humor land. Even the Easter eggs feel carefully designed to fit into the world and the lives of the characters, rather than drawing focus away from them or sticking out as a glaring distraction. — Austen Goslin, Polygon

Do the violence and humor work?

It’s strong, it’s goddamn hilarious, and it highlights exactly how to swing for the fences while still knowing where Homebase is. It may be a new series, but Fallout is an instant classic of the streaming age. — Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community

A bright and funny apocalypse filled with dark punchlines and bursts of ultra-violence, Fallout is among the best video game adaptations ever made. — Matt Purslow, IGN Movies

Finding a tonal balance between the drama and the comedy is a razor’s edge, but Fallout makes it look effortless. As a result, spending time in this hardened world is as fun, engaging, and engrossing as the games. — William Goodman, TheWrap

It’s an equal parts funny and nightmarish show that, like its protagonist, isn’t content to live inside a projection of the past. — Kambole Campbell, Empire Magazine

Crucially, these laugh-out-loud moments of disbelief don’t detract from the harsh reality of this world, which is perhaps even more violent than you might expect, especially for newbies to this franchise. — David Opie, Digital Spy

Any final thoughts?

Fallout is a clever, twisted apocalyptic odyssey that soars as both a video game adaptation and a standalone series. — Lauren Coates, The Spool

For those who have never played the Fallout series, especially those of the time-strapped ilk who can’t just pour hundreds of hours into a game, they should give Prime Video’s Fallout a go. — Howard Waldstein, CBR

Fallout is both totally rad and an absolute blast. — Neil Armstrong, BBC.com

The show’s clearly committed to being the definitive Fallout adaptation, a love letter to fans, no question, while still opening the vault door to welcome in just about everyone else brave enough to step inside. — Jon Negroni, TV Line

There’s really nothing like Fallout on television right now, and that’s ultimately a good thing. — Therese Lacson, Collider

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‘Fallout’ Series Gets New Release Date on Prime Video

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“ Fallout ” is stepping out of the vault earlier than originally planned.

Prime Video has announced that “Fallout,” adapted from the retro-futuristic video game franchise of the same name, will premiere all eight episodes on April 10 at 6 p.m. PT. The special release includes a live global fan premiere of the first episode, where viewers worldwide can choose their faction and interact with other fans via a live chat function.

Popular on Variety

This is the second update Prime Video has made to the series’ release strategy: “Fallout” was set to drop all eight episodes on April 11, one day earlier than its original April 12 premiere.

MacLachlan, who plays Vault 33 overseer Hank McLean, told Variety of the “Fallout” series adaptation, “The people that play the video games that are real fans are both excited and somewhat hesitant, I think, because they’ve been burned before. But as we’ve been progressively getting into more press about it, as more of the teasers have come out, I find that the tone is shifting from one of ‘Oh, I hope I don’t mess it up’ to one of ‘Oh, I’m so excited. I think this looks pretty great.’”

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The Dropout Review: The Downfall of Elizabeth Holmes
Review: Hulu's 'The Dropout' dramatizes the rise and fall of Theranos
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‘The Dropout’ Review: Hulu Show Is a Decent Version of Theranos Story
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COMMENTS

The Dropout review
Yes it's clunky at points, but Amanda Seyfried excels as one-time billionaire grifter Elizabeth Holmes - and the story is simply too jaw-dropping to pass up
The Dropout: Limited Series
Rated 4.5/5 Stars • Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 11/10/23 Full Review David W While well cast, The Dropout suffers from a screenplay that could be more engaging. It's an interesting show that keeps ...
'The Dropout' Review: Amanda Seyfried Triumphs as Elizabeth Holmes
Courtesy of Hulu. " The Dropout " knows what it has in Elizabeth Holmes, the real-life enigma who managed to con the biggest power players in Silicon Valley and beyond that she, and she alone ...
The Dropout (TV Mini Series 2022)
The Dropout: Created by Elizabeth Meriwether. With Amanda Seyfried, Naveen Andrews, Michel Gill, William H. Macy. TV series that chronicles Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' attempt to revolutionize the healthcare industry after dropping out of college and starting a technology company.
The Dropout
Upcoming Movies and TV shows; ... 90% 97 Reviews Avg. Tomatometer 82% 250+ Ratings Avg. Audience Score In a tale of ambition and fame gone terribly wrong, ... The Dropout: Limited Series ...
'The Dropout' review: Amanda Seyfried stars in Hulu's eye ...
"The Dropout" is just the latest look at the cutthroat world of such start-ups, coming close on the heels of "Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber," which shares some of the same tragic excesses.
'The Dropout' Review: Theranos Boss Elizabeth Holmes' Blood Runs Cold
Between The Dropout, Netflix's con-woman tale Inventing Anna, Showtime's Uber origin story Super Pumped, and Apple's upcoming WeWork miniseries WeCrashed, we are nearing Peak Scammer TV.More ...
Amanda Seyfried in Hulu's 'The Dropout': TV Review
The Dropout. The Bottom Line Bloody good performances. Airdate: Thursday, March 3 (Hulu) Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Naveen Andrews. Creator: Elizabeth Meriwether from the ABC Audio podcast. The fun ...
The Dropout Review: Amanda Seyfried Leads a Sturdy ...
The Dropout, based on a 2019 ABC News podcast covering the whole debacle, stars Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, an awkward but focused young woman who lays out her life goals pretty early on in the ...
Review: The Dropout Is More Than Just Another Scammer Show
By Judy Berman. March 1, 2022 1:31 PM EST. The Dropout wants us to understand that Elizabeth Holmes is a deeply bizarre human being. Before plunging into the saga of Theranos, the notorious ...
Review: 'The Dropout' Hits the Scammer-Show Sweet Spot
A review of the new limited series 'The Dropout,' about the rise and fall of blood-testing company Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, played by Amanda Seyfried, streaming on Hulu ...
The Dropout review: More Elizabeth Holmes scandal drama isn ...
Hulu's The Dropout casts Amanda Seyfried as Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes. Read our review of the show, which just released on Hulu, to see why it's worth watching even after podcasts ...
The Dropout review: An overlong Theranos investigation that's somehow
Theranos is certainly a funny story, in a modern-capitalism-is-anti-human sort of way. But The Dropout often uses comedy as a crutch, aiming way too often for that Pam & Tommy tone of needle-drop ...
The Dropout review: An unconvincing case for Elizabeth Holmes' humanity
The true focus of The Dropout is exploring the circumstances of Holmes' life and her relationships as a commentary on the culture that gave birth to the concept of $1 billion unicorns. The ...
The Dropout Offers Conflicting Views of Controversial Woman
"The Dropout," Hulu's latest contribution to the streaming world's current glut of limited series about doomed startups and con artists (see also: Netflix's "Inventing Anna," Showtime's "Super Pumped," et al.), falls prey to many of this nascent subgenre's failings.It's too long and convoluted by half, and sometimes drops a couple of balls when juggling its oversized ...
'The Dropout' Review: Hulu Show Is a Decent Version of ...
"The Dropout"Beth Dubber/Hulu. So "The Dropout" reaches for slivers of paranoid thriller, high-stakes financial drama, and boardroom farce without fully cashing in on the best parts of either.
The Dropout
The Dropout is an American biographical drama television miniseries that dramatises the rise and fall of the disgraced biotechnology company Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, played by Amanda Seyfried. It features an ensemble supporting cast, including Naveen Andrews, Elizabeth Marvel, William H. Macy, Stephen Fry, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Bill Irwin, Utkarsh Ambudkar, LisaGay Hamilton ...
'The Dropout' Review: Out for Blood at Theranos
Amanda Seyfried stars as Elizabeth Holmes in this eight-part show based on the podcast of the same name. Elizabeth Holmes, who rode Silicon Valley's "fake it till you make it" ethos all the ...
'The Dropout' review: Amanda Seyfried nails mysterious Elizabeth Holmes
The latest in this line is "The Dropout," (★★ ½ out of four), an eight-part series about Elizabeth Holmes now streaming weekly on Hulu.. Amanda Seyfried stars as Elizabeth Holmes
Review: Elizabeth Holmes series 'The Dropout' is best when it gets
Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in "The Dropout." Photo: Beth Dubber / Hulu. The degree of accuracy Amanda Seyfried attempts to bring to her role as disgraced Theranos blood-testing startup founder Elizabeth Holmes in "The Dropout," a Hulu limited series premiering Thursday, March 3, is admirable. It is also distracting and probably unnecessary.
The Dropout Review: The Downfall of Elizabeth Holmes
The Dropout Review: The Downfall of Elizabeth Holmes. By Ashley Hajimirsadeghi. Published Mar 4, 2022. Amanda Seyfried stars as Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu's The Dropout, a bildungsroman on her life ...
'The Dropout' review: Elizabeth Holmes drama isn't as good as the true
Amanda Seyfried's take on Elizabeth Holmes anchors this Theranos drama. Streaming soon on Hulu, 'The Dropout' often over-dramatizes the true story, much to its detriment.
The Dropout review: Elizabeth Holmes drama lacks subtlety but is more
The subtlety of The Dropout's position on Holmes is not matched by the subtlety of the show in any other department. It has all the smoothed down edges of an iMac, or an Edison machine.
Fallout First Reviews: A 'Violent, Fun, Emotional, Epic' Video Game
Prime Video's TV adaptation of Fallout does something the games in the legendary franchise never have—put storytelling above all else. — Bernard Boo, Den of Geek Fallout is the new standard for video game adaptations. This series is violent, fun, emotional, epic, and just plain awesome. — Alex Maidy, JoBlo's Movie Network Opting for a new narrative that simply takes place in the ...
'Fallout' Series Gets New Release Date on Prime Video
By Michaela Zee. " Fallout " is stepping out of the vault earlier than originally planned. Prime Video has announced that "Fallout," adapted from the retro-futuristic video game franchise ...

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