The Dropout

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.