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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
23
Mixed:
11
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Mar 4, 2022
Season 1 Review:
"The Dropout" will be tough to top, or even match, because of the way Seyfried, along with Meriwether and her writers, marry the visible facets of Holmes' put-on with her skewed ethical paradigm. ... ["The Dropout" makes] a person appreciate the scope of crime – and, better still, the extraordinary pleasure of watching Seyfried and the rest of the actors recreate this case with genuine confidence.
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The PlaylistMar 2, 2022
The Daily BeastMar 4, 2022
Season 1 Review:
You get a sense of who Holmes was, what drove her ambition and, ultimately, the desperation behind her foolish delusion that she had to stay the course, even as things careened out of control. Yet the series never lionizes her or glorifies her actions—tempting given the scale and implausibility of what she pulled off for as long as she did. ... [The Dropout] gives us something much more valuable, something that Theranos hoped to achieve itself: A new, better way of doing things.
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Mar 4, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The artistry of “The Dropout” is that while it never makes excuses for Holmes and shines a harsh spotlight on her bizarre behavior and sociopathic-level lack of empathy, we see her as a three-dimensional human being who had unlimited potential and probably WOULD have achieved something great had she listened to those who were trying to get her to slow down and do things the right way.
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Mar 2, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Employing a deftly selected soundtrack of early-to-mid-aughts bangers to bring home the cultural specificity of her rise and fall, the limited series compounds both the gravity and ridiculousness of what Holmes did not achieve. Seyfried finds Holmes’s awkward, serious, entrepreneurship-driven persona not only in her verbal oddities, but also in her physicality. ... The interpretation is as important as the details of Holmes’s story.
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Mar 2, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Boasting an inordinately good cast in even relatively minor roles, the series adopts an unexpectedly sympathetic posture toward Holmes, at least in the early going, as she seized on the idea of improving the blood-testing process before dropping out of Stanford to pursue her vision.
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Mar 1, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Seyfried, who was Oscar-nominated for "Mank" last year, is just as revelatory here, but strictly as an actress, not as a window into the phenomenon of Holmes. The portrayal is absorbing, committed and morbidly fascinating. ... Whether Holmes was an enchantress remains mysterious, though she certainly represents the kind of millennial con artistry that's in vogue right now.
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Feb 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Sure, there’s nothing here you couldn’t have gotten from the two-hour Gibney documentary. But the Gibney documentary doesn’t have an award-worthy performance from Seyfried, and it doesn’t have the pleasures of these little acting victories from Metcalf, from Smith, from Kate Burton, from Michael Ironside, from Elizabeth Marvel, from Michaela Watkins. And more.
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ColliderFeb 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
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.
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Mar 3, 2022
Season 1 Review:
To some degree The Dropout is just a re-enactment of the public record — re-enactments of Elizabeth’s court deposition do a lot of the series’ expositional heavy lifting — but there is something strangely compelling about watching an actor portraying the purveyor of this audacious corporate fraud.
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Mar 3, 2022
Season 1 Review:
We’re going to stick with The Dropout because of Seyfried’s pitch-perfect performance as Holmes as well as the myriad guest actor performances that are already looking promising by the end of the first episode. We just hope that the show doesn’t continue to make Holmes the hero of her own story.
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The GuardianMar 3, 2022
Season 1 Review:
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. ... 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).
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The IndependentMar 1, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Anchored by Seyfried’s charmingly vulnerable central performance, and assisted by the comedy chops of executive producers like New Girl’s Elizabeth Merriweather 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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Radio TimesFeb 28, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Despite its many shortcomings, it's not difficult to binge through The Dropout. But make no mistake, it's always the unbelievable nature of this factual scandal that compels you to click 'next episode', as opposed to any bold choices from the creative team behind this vanilla miniseries.
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Mar 3, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Save for the corrosive romance at the heart of the show, “The Dropout’s” first seven episodes (the number provided to critics) don’t imagine enough, perhaps to hew to a journalistic impulse that’s noble in theory, but fails to fully satisfy in execution. In the end, its title character remains as elusive as her promises.
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Feb 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
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.
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Feb 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
At its core, The Dropout has some interesting ideas — Holmes as a faux-feminist figure (is it girlboss to defraud people and potentially put many more in danger?), presenting the tech and pharmaceutical industries as corporate entities that don't care about the masses — but it never figures out how to present them coherently or intriguingly.
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