The Dropout

Think, “The Social Network” if it were less clinical, more emotionally perceptive, and somehow even sometimes sympathetic towards its similarly strange, dissocial, and pathological protagonist. It’s also led by an outstanding performance by Amanda Seyfried.

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.

Hulu’s portrayal of her girlbossing too close to the sun is captivating through and through.

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.

Start engraving a Best Actress Emmy for Amanda Seyfried who is sensational as Theranos founder and fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in a true-crime story that is more than compulsively watchable, it’s a cautionary fable that really stings.

The discovery that Elizabeth might not be the most interesting or important person on screen at all times is what makes The Dropout so watchable and so often startlingly moving.

Great cast, fine performances, consistently entertaining.

Compelling. ... Amanda Seyfried humanizes this enigmatic faux visionary by capturing her eerie intensity and drive. [14 - 27 Mar 2022, p.6]

This textured and tenacious show is much more than a villain’s story, and showcases Seyfried’s talents at an exciting phase in her career.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Dropout slowly draws you in, because the stakes are so much higher and Holmes’s rise is enthralling.

“The Dropout” succeeds where “Inventing Anna” doesn’t, creating a sharp portrait of an unnerving woman that doesn’t excuse her actions, but makes them at least more understandable (as in more easily understood, not more “relatable”).

It’s a maddening, gripping, and at times startlingly funny recreation of a story that would feel too absurd to be true if we didn’t already know otherwise.

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 good news is that, either way, this is a tale that even in its most straightforward telling still has plenty to latch on to.

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.

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.

Seyfried did a good job of conveying the complex hubris of Holmes, who, while flouting the rules, did enough to be credible and show how her charisma convinced lots of rich people. ... The drama's tactics were less nuanced.

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).

On paper, Holmes’ story of unbridled ambition at any cost is shocking and makes for delicious gossip. But the excitement doesn’t translate on screen, and the episodes are dragged down with dawdling dialogue.

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.

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.

Amanda Seyfried gamely does her best, and at times she succeeds in capturing Holmes’ mannerisms and deranged energy.

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.

For all the individual highlights “The Dropout” offers, it fails to cohere into a streamlined whole, which is more than a little frustrating.

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.

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.