Hulu's TheDropout is 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.
, we are nearing Peak Scammer TV. More often than not, these stories involve the tech sector run amok, trying to reinvent things that already exist and somehow making them worse in the process. At one point here, Holmes quotes Mark Zuckerberg’s famous “move fast and break things” mantra, andcontinually illustrates how easy it is to break things and how hard it is to get them right., especially if you listened to the podcast of the same name that inspired it.
Originally, Kate McKinnon was set to play Holmes, but she dropped out before filming began. McKinnon and Seyfried are close in age, but it’s hard to imagine McKinnon playing Holmes at 18 without it feeling like a comedy sketch. Holmes starts out as a believer herself, convinced that the Edison is just a step or two away from working, and that she — and, after she brings him in as COO to fend off a challenge by her board members, Sunny — just has to keep the company funded long enough for the crucial breakthrough to happen. As a result, the early episodes have a lighter, caper-like tone.
In her trial, Holmes pinned most of Theranos’ worst deeds on Balwani. Naveen Andrews plays him as aggrieved and malevolent, even as the show treats them as partners in crime, rather than her as a naive young woman bullied into bad deeds by her nasty boyfriend. 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.premiere March 3 on Hulu, with additional installments streaming weekly. I’ve seen seven of the eight episodes.