Elizabeth Holmes' wild trial almost remade 'The Dropout.' Here's why it was left out
LOS ANGELES — Liz Meriwether, the creator of "New Girl" and "Single Parents," became fascinated with Elizabeth Holmes in 2019, much like the rest of us. She remembers being drawn in by a Vanity Fair piece that detailed the Silicon Valley wunderkind's final months at her biotech company, Theranos, which promised to revolutionize blood testing but was ultimately consumed by fraud allegations. Intrigued by the dramatic story, she also listened to the ABC News podcast "The Dropout," which detailed Holmes' rise and fall.
"I felt a lot of the similarities in my life with her," Meriwether says. "We're similar in age, we have the same name, and just that experience of being young and female in a position of power quickly."
For those who need a refresher: In 2004, at 20, Holmes dropped out of Stanford University to launch the startup. At its peak in 2014, the company was valued at over $9 billion and Holmes was a darling of the New Yorker, Forbes and other outlets; by 2015, Holmes, then 31, was named the world's youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes. Just months later, the Wall Street Journal exposed shortcomings in Theranos' technology, setting in motion the company's, and Holmes', staggering fall.
As Theranos was building momentum — enlisting as board members two former U.S. secretaries of State, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, and entering a partnership with Walgreens — Meriwether was launching her own dizzying kind of startup: her first TV series, "New Girl" on Fox.
"I felt like I could make sense of choices she made up to a certain point," Meriwether says. "The idea of being a young woman in power without many role models of other women
