Why <em>The Dropout</em> Succeeds Where Other Scammer Shows Fall Short
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. “I was 19,” Seyfried replies in Holmes’s near-parodic baritone, to a wave of admiring laughter and applause.
Clinton isn’t played by an actor. It’s the actual former president. And he isn’t the only one on tape praising Holmes, with Seyfried there as digital stand-in. Then–Vice President Joe Biden also gets screen time, wisecracking about the innovative wunderkind. 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.
By 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. The show blurs the same lines the founder herself did.
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?
Holmes’s interviews with Clinton, Biden, and Rose were all in the summer of 2015. By October, though, she and Theranos were reeling after The Wall Street Journal reported that the company’s technology simply didn’t work. Seven years later, Holmes is awaiting sentencing after conviction of fraud.
isn’t alone in chronicling scammers these days, though it’s perhaps the most compelling and nuanced entry in the genre. Three other recent shows with star-studded casts follow wealthy grifters from the 2010s: ,starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as the WeWork founders; ,with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Uber’s Travis Kalanick; and ,featuring Julia
