And of course, there’s Netflix’s Inventing Anna about the socialite scammer Anna Delvey. There’s the Showtime show Super Pumped about the rise and fall of Uber’s founder. There’s Apple TV+’s WeCrashed about WeWork’s husband-and-wife founders Adam and Rebekah Neumann. But that isn’t the only scammer show on television these days. The Hulu series stars Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, the infamous tech company that crashed rather famously starting around 2015 and was revealed to essentially be a multibillion-dollar fraud. Sophie Gilbert: We are here to talk about The Dropout. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts Why are these stories dominating our screens right now? And what does this moment reveal about American culture? Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Shirley Li discuss while recapping what they’ve appreciated about The Dropout: Three other recent shows with star-studded casts follow wealthy grifters from the 2010s: WeCrashed, starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as the WeWork founders Super Pumped, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Uber’s Travis Kalanick and Inventing Anna, featuring Julia Garner as the fake socialite Anna Delvey. The Dropout isn’t alone in chronicling scammers these days, though it’s perhaps the most compelling and nuanced entry in the genre. Seven years later, Holmes is awaiting sentencing after conviction of fraud. By October, though, she and Theranos were reeling after The Wall Street Journal reported that the company’s technology simply didn’t work. Holmes’s interviews with Clinton, Biden, and Rose were all in the summer of 2015. What is fact and what is fiction? When does fake-it-until-you-make-it become simply fraud? And as that fraud is sold as a Silicon Valley fairy tale, where do the boosters of a hopeful mission become complicit in hurting people? The show blurs the same lines the founder herself did. Even Charlie Rose, the since-disgraced interviewer, appears beside Seyfried, his trademark black background mixing with Holmes’s all-black wardrobe to make her appear almost Oz-like as a floating head.īy using real tape of the three men, The Dropout doesn’t just remind us of how close Holmes was to the arbiters of power in America. Then–Vice President Joe Biden also gets screen time, wisecracking about the innovative wunderkind. And he isn’t the only one on tape praising Holmes, with Seyfried there as digital stand-in. “I was 19,” Seyfried replies in Holmes’s near-parodic baritone, to a wave of admiring laughter and applause.Ĭlinton isn’t played by an actor. A familiar voice opens the latest episode of The Dropout, Hulu’s series about the fall of the infamous blood-testing start-up Theranos: “You founded this company 12 years ago, right? Tell them how old you were.” It’s former President Bill Clinton, praising the company founder and figurehead, Elizabeth Holmes, as played by Amanda Seyfried.
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