the dropout movie review

‘The Dropout,’ Starring Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes, Triumphs Where Other ‘Based on a True Story’ Shows Have Failed: TV Review

By Caroline Framke

Caroline Framke

Chief TV Critic

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“ The Dropout ” knows what it has in Elizabeth Holmes , the real-life enigma who managed to con the biggest power players in Silicon Valley and beyond that she, and she alone, was the future of technology in health care. With her wide-set eyes and impossibly husky voice, Holmes emerged from the pack of bland bros in Patagonia vests as the kind of uniquely, perversely compelling figure that Hollywood has never been able to resist for long. So as with any “stranger than fiction” story in recent memory, it was only a matter of time before someone adapted Holmes’ story to the screen; there’s ostensibly an HBO series in the works, as well as an Adam McKay movie starring Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes. But this Hulu limited series, based on ABC’s podcast investigation into Holmes and her company Theranos, is the first — and its canny performances, writing, and directing should set a high bar for every other version to come.

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“The Dropout” follows Elizabeth ( Amanda Seyfried ) from her time as the ambitious teenage daughter of a disgraced Enron executive (Michael Gill), to her fraught time at Stanford, to her meeting manipulative businessman Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), to building Theranos from the ground up without making sure the foundation could withstand any real pressure. There are so many different avenues the series could go down, so many perspectives to mine, so many bizarre beats it could’ve hammered home with grim resolve. Instead, it combines the inherent gravitas of Theranos’ collapse with the comedic timing of creator Elizabeth Meriweather (“New Girl”) and director Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick”) to dig into both the pathos and the absurdity of every wild turn this story takes.

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What’s more, in a huge coup for the power of editing a show down despite it airing on a streaming network with no time constraints, the series convincingly covers almost 20 years of material without a single episode running over an hour long. (I screened seven out of eight episodes for this review, so I reserve the right to retract this praise should the finale come in at 90 minutes.) And unlike a show like “Inventing Anna,” Netflix’s recent series about New York scammer Anna Delvey that routinely let episodes stray into the 70+ minute range, “The Dropout” also resists the temptation to hold a giant mirror up to its viewer to demand that we, too, examine our parts in consuming this wild tale. There’s plenty else to get through without writing some thesis about What It All Means, and plenty of aghast characters trying to slow down the runaway Theranos train, to make these points without the show highlighting them in bold. In that respect, when “The Dropout” is on the nose — as with just about every nostalgic music cue from teen Elizabeth’s love of the Alabama song “I’m In a Hurry (and Don’t Know Why)” to donning her signature black turtleneck to Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” — there’s at least a sense that the show realizes it, too.

And so “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”). As portrayed in this series, Elizabeth Holmes is as terrible as she is recognizable. She doesn’t come out of nowhere, but a noxious combination of ambition, willful ignorance to suffering beyond her own, and a pressing need to destroy every condescending, sexist person standing in her way.

Portraying Holmes’ evolution without straying too far into pure imitation would be a tall order for any actor, and not just because they’d also have to embody her from age 17 to 34. Even the most glowing of profiles about Holmes at the height of her power nonetheless included caveats about her unsettling demeanor, which had the ability to both attract and repel in a single breath. After “Saturday Night Live” star Kate McKinnon bowed out of “The Dropout” to play Carole Baskin in Peacock’s upcoming series about the wild subjects of Netflix’s “Tiger King,” “The Dropout” replaced her with Amanda Seyfried — a choice that quickly proves inspired.

Seyfried has quietly built an impressive resume full of eager ingenues (“Mank,” “Mamma Mia”), charismatic seducers (“Chloe”), rebellious teens (“Veronica Mars,” “Twin Peaks”), and young women simmering on the edge of total righteous fury (“Big Love,” “Jennifer’s Body”). In “The Dropout,” she gets to embody all these types and then some, infusing Elizabeth with a manic drive and desperation to win that makes her every scene viscerally effective. Her performance makes it easy to see how the girl who dances around her childhood bedroom while locking eyes with her Steve Jobs poster becomes the woman who fleeces millions from the world’s most powerful men by selling them her vision with a zeal one can only describe as religious in its intensity. And while she does eventually embrace Holmes’ truly jarring voice , she and “The Dropout” are patient with its progression, using its descent to mirror Elizabeth’s own. The moment when she doubles down on it is also the moment when she doubles down on Theranos as the world’s best hope when it is, in fact, nothing but a high-stakes bluff.

Though it’s Seyfried who must anchor the series with a performance that simultaneously humanizes Elizabeth and justifies her unique pull to the many who want to trust her, it helps that she’s also surrounded by a murderers’ row of talented actors who more than pull their weight. As her frequent scene partner in the role of Sunny, Andrews is equally convincing, and even menacing, as the relationship between Sunny and Elizabeth sours. Stephen Fry and James Hiroyuki Liao are quietly heartbreaking as Theranos’ overwhelmed voices of reason, roles later taken up by Dylan Minette and Camryn Mi-young Kim as the whistleblowers who eventually send Theranos on its fateful downward spiral. Michaela Watkins and Kurtwood Smith turn the dial up to “chilling” as Theranos’ formidable legal team, while Alan Ruck swings in the other direction as an overeager Walgreens executive dying to believe that Elizabeth is the real deal.

Back in Elizabeth’s hometown, Gill and Elizabeth Marvel play her parents with a stalwart pride that erupts when faced with William H. Macy and Mary Lynn Rajskub as the neighbors they find inexcusably tacky. Macy in particular, made up with a half bald cap that makes his forehead appear about eight feet tall, feels ripped from a different and more cartoonish show, but it works when he’s eventually paired with Laurie Metcalf as a perfectly dry professor who never bought what Elizabeth was selling. I haven’t even mentioned Bill Irwin and “Ghosts” breakout Utkarsh Ambudkar as Elizabeth’s lab scientists, or Sam Waterston as (somehow) 90 year-old George Schultz, or Kate Burton as Fry’s wife, so, suffice it to say that “The Dropout” isn’t hurting for solid actors who make the most of every scene they get.

Still: many other shows have crammed in as much talent as they can get, only to fall flatter than they should, considering. What makes “The Dropout” so convincing, in the end, is that it both takes its material seriously and makes the increasingly rare choice to tell its story in largely chronological order even as it bookends most episodes with Holmes’ 2017 deposition about Theranos’ downfall. After reviewing far too many shows that try to manufacture drama with storylines that run parallel, begin at the ending, or drop into the middle for the sheer disorienting hell of it, it was a genuine relief to watch this one and remember the simple satisfaction of a compelling story told from its banal beginning to jaw-dropping end.

“The Dropout” premieres its first three episodes Thursday, March 3 on Hulu.

• Production: Executive producers: Elizabeth Meriwether, Liz Heldens, Liz Hannah, Katherine Pope, Rebecca Jarvis, Victoria Thompson, Taylor Dunn, Michael Showalter, Jordana Mollick.
• Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Naveen Andrews, William H. Macy, Laurie Metcalf, Sam Waterston, Dylan Minnette, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Alan Ruck, Elizabeth Marvel, LisaGay Hamilton, Michaela Watkins.

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Amanda seyfried in hulu’s ‘the dropout’: tv review.

The actress plays Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in this limited series costarring Naveen Andrews.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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For those exhausted by a winter pondering the solvency of cryptocurrency, the tangibility of NFTs and the alleged unmasking of QAnon, TV is offering a very strange form of escapism.

Hardly a week seems to be passing without the premiere of a new limited series about real-life fraud and corruption, usually focusing on the Internet as a pit of degradation capable of cultivating such deceit, often centering around a photogenic blonde protagonist.

The Dropout

Airdate: Thursday, March 3 (Hulu)

Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Naveen Andrews

Creator: Elizabeth Meriwether from the ABC Audio podcast

The fun game, honestly, has been picking out which parts of the Venn diagram they do or don’t fulfill. Netflix’s Inventing Anna , about social media-spawned con artist Anna Delvey, checks every box. In Hulu’s Pam & Tommy , the photogenic blonde protagonist is a victim of the Internet’s insatiable maw, not a perpetrator. In Showtime’s Super Pumped , the grossness comes from dude-bros. In NBC’s The Thing About Pam , the twist is that a photogenic blonde actress (Renee Zellweger) is pretending to be an unphotogenic criminal. In Apple TV+’s WeCrashed: The Rise and Fall of WeWork , Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto are brunettes.

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Of course, tech bubble sagas needn’t be tied to the Internet at all. See Hulu’s The Dropou t, adapted by Elizabeth Meriwether from the ABC Audio podcast about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes — not to be confused with the Alex Gibney documentary or any of various books and long-form reported pieces. The Internet wasn’t completely without complicity in the elevation of the turtleneck-wearing biotechnology entrepreneur, but the story’s major point of differentiation is that Holmes didn’t create an imaginary cyber-service that never existed. She created a tangible, paradigm-shifting service that never existed.

In short, Elizabeth Holmes was different from all of this season’s other small-screen fraudsters, except for the ways she’s the same, and The Dropout is the same as many of this season’s small-screen depictions of fraudsters, except for the ways it’s different — starting with the excellent and enigmatic lead performance by Amanda Seyfried and a supporting cast boasting one superb scene-stealer after another.

The basic refresher of the Elizabeth Holmes story: As a student at Stanford, she came up with an idea for an efficient machine that could run a wide battery of blood tests at home and off of a single drop of blood. It wasn’t a well-developed idea and none of the prototypes worked, but Holmes dropped out of college, launched Theranos — half “therapy” and half “diagnose” — and, over a decade, she built the company into something with a valuation of $9 billion, despite not having a product that anybody could use. She was on the cover of magazines and profiled on various TV shows, intriguing Silicon Valley and the halls of power with her youth and marketable appearance. Then everything came crashing down.

Unlike Inventing Anna , which buried its eponymous anti-heroine in a journalistically unconvincing story of a reporter trying to uncover answers about a woman who defied answers, Meriwether and her team take Holmes on directly. There are few, if any, composites and none of the names have been changed to protect the innocent or guilty; characters here include tech mogul Larry Ellison (Hart Bochner), former Secretary of State George Schultz (Sam Waterston), mega-attorney David Boies (Kurtwood Smith), Bad Blood author John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and then countless technology, academic and scientific bigwigs.

The thing that The Dropout does best is capture a sense of human scale. It’s the people who were part of the trickery, primarily Sunny Balwani ( Naveen Andrews ), Holmes’ boyfriend and eventual Theranos COO. It’s the people who were trapped in the deception, various researchers and engineers and board members who bought into what they thought was Holmes’ vision — folks like Stanford professor Channing Robertson (Bill Irwin), her former college TA Rakesh (Utkarsh Ambudkar), a slew of Walgreens executives (played by Josh Pais and Alan Ruck primarily) and chemist Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry). And then there were the people who, for a variety of reasons, tried to sound alarms and bring her down, from entrepreneur Richarch Fuisz (William H. Macy) to Stanford professor Phyllis Gardner (Laurie Metcalf).

Much more than most depictions of vast conspiracies, The Dropout nails the “vastness,” illustrating how a charismatic leader, even one as magnificently awkward as Holmes, could make people buy their snake oil and ignore increasingly unavoidable realities.

Meriwether and director Michael Showalter have backgrounds in comedy and while The Dropout isn’t exactly “funny” as its primary tone, there’s a lot of humor here. Long-form con stories are tough because they require a perpetrator to be implausibly ahead-of-the-game at every point and nearly all the other characters to be implausibly stupid at nearly every point, but The Dropout sustains itself by showing how Elizabeth wasn’t fooling one person the same way every time. Part of why the show never feels slow or repetitive is that Holmes was filling different needs for different people, or rather people were projecting different things onto her in different situations.

Was Elizabeth Holmes brilliant? A brilliant charlatan? Or was she an attractive cipher into whom people read attributes she never possessed? The Dropout and Seyfried’s performance leave boundless room for disparate conclusions or, probably more appropriately, to decide that the series is applying conclusions to a person whose actual identity is completely unknowable. There are times Seyfried is approaching Holmes as a mad genius, sometimes as a youthful innocent and occasionally as something borderline monstrous; if you don’t feel like she lands on any one thing, I’m guessing that’s intentional.

So if you want to diagnose her as either sociopathic or neurodivergent, Seyfried gives you ammunition, all while playing a woman who isn’t comfortable in her body, her voice — nailed in its throaty artificiality — or, ultimately, her aspirational identity. The series and performance are curious about Holmes and I never felt they went too far into actual sympathy. Sunny, for his part, is treated with much more consistent contempt, on the edge of being a sexual predator in their initial encounters and straight-up abusive later.

Structurally, Holmes is always at the center of The Dropout , but there is a shift as episodes progress (critics have been sent seven of the series’ eight hours); the crusaders for truth, or in some cases revenge, get individual episodes in which they play hero as well. It’s all a strategy to impressively service this absurdly good cast.

The big supporting roles are well-filled. Macy, partially obscured by a bald cap that makes him look like a reject from Alien Nation , is great as a man doing the right thing out of sheer pouty pique. James Hiroyuki Liao is wonderful as Edmond Ku, one of the first people to sense something was very wrong at Theranos. Pais and Ruck shine as portraits of corporate myopia, and Dylan Minnette and Camryn Mi-Young Kim do good work as two of the young employees who begin to doubt their corporate messiah.

But more than those fully fleshed-out secondary characters, I loved the actors who anchor the series with brief parts that they must have filmed in only a couple of days. Metcalf has a few astonishingly withering monologues, including one about Yoda. LisaGay Hamilton, playing Carreyrou’s Wall Street Journal editor, has a speech about fishing that made me laugh out loud. And there’s a scene of legal vetting with Hamilton, Smith and Moss-Bachrach that may be my favorite in the whole series.

There are so many fantastic pieces to The Dropout that I stopped thinking about how little here felt “new” or “revelatory” per se, and those pieces kept me from expressing my normal complaints about whether the story could have been more efficiently told.

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.

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• What Is Cinema?

The Dropout Makes Sense of Elizabeth Holmes

To be like Elizabeth Holmes, you have to believe in the idea of something over and above the thing itself. Luckily for Holmes, the now disgraced founder of blood test start-up Theranos, this is America. Empty ideology is the point. The series The Dropout, adapted for Hulu from the ABC Audio podcast of the same name hosted by Rebecca Jarvis, stars Amanda Seyfried as Holmes from high schooler to CEO. 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. She lumbers around hesitantly, unsure of her place in her own body. Her mouth seems to be playing pinball around her own face. She smiles, showing both upper and bottom rows of teeth. The interpretation is as important as the details of Holmes’s story. In the Theranos scandal, we meet a young woman who finds self-worth at first by developing a sense of grander purpose, and then through distortion and manipulation.

Those manipulations manifest both outwardly and inwardly; over the course of the series, we see Holmes transform from a naive yet assertive student to a grieving, fragile start-up founder, to a power-playing fraudster. Yes, she changes her voice to a startlingly deep vocal register in order to appear authoritative. But she also adjusts and readjusts her facial expressions, trying to find the right position from which to convince a slew of male executives, investors, and journalists that she’s a dropout genius of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs caliber.

At first, in the series, Holmes earnestly pursues her passion to start a company by sketching, ideating, and maneuvering her way into a graduate research lab. She wants to develop a patch to automatically detect illness and administer medicine to patients. Her adviser, Channing Robertson ( Bill Irwin ), an eventual Theranos board member, puts her in touch with another professor, Phyllis Gardner ( Laurie Metcalf ), who—in a scene traveling from her Stanford office to one of the university’s courtyard—shoots down the scientifically impossible idea and tries to set her on a more rigorous path. This reality check momentarily sobers Holmes, and she begins to finally focus on regular undergraduate life. But after a traumatic event, Holmes returns to her mission. This time, she giddily announces to Robertson and her former T.A. and now lab partner Rakesh Madhava ( Utkarsh Ambudkar ), it’s a machine that can diagnose a whole host of illnesses with only a single drop of blood.

Ignoring every good piece of advice she’s so far been given, the 19-year-old attaches herself to the most dubious guidance. Sunny Balwani, Theranos’s COO—who is expected to stand trial this March after Holmes’s conviction on one count of conspiracy and three counts of wire fraud—seemed at first to be a friend. British actor Naveen Andrews costars with Seyfried as the Pakistani American businessman who made his own small fortune selling a website just before the dot-com bust. The Dropout shows that at the time of their meeting in Beijing, the summer before Holmes begins as a freshman at Stanford, he’s nearly twice her age and learning Mandarin at her same exchange program in order to gain an advantage with the rising Chinese market. In real life, Holmes has testified that after she was sexually assaulted in college, she sought comfort with Balwani, and that their relationship turned into a sexual one. Holmes also testified that Balwani verbally and sexually abused her during their relationship, and was a controlling force in their business partnership. Balwani denies these allegations.

The series—produced in part by New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether, The Post screenwriter Liz Hannah, and yes, another Liz/Elizabeth, Liz Heldens, creator of the NBC soap Deception —does not fully accept Holmes’s story that Balwani groomed and manipulated her into bad business decisions. It does, however, paint a complex and disturbing portrait of their bizarre dynamics. Andrews, much more dashing than the real Balwani, gradually morphs from interested and attentive to needy and leering, then full-on aggro and resentful. He comes close to outrightly abusive behavior, but mostly hovers around generalized toxicity. In the show, Holmes, with no reference for what a healthy relationship might look like, is ambivalent. Unsure of whether she needs to cut him off or hang onto him with her dear life, she attempts to play Balwani like a game of chess. In the end, they spend a lot of time dancing.

Holmes’s family, too, fails to offer good counsel. In the series, her nervous, WASP mother, Noel (character actor Elizabeth Marvel in top form, as ever), encourages her to push down her anxieties and rages and to subsume her identity into her work. Her father, Chris ( House of Cards ’s Michel Gill ), who lost his income to the Enron scandal, just wants his daughter to make good on his investment. You feel a bit badly for the younger Holmes—here’s a girl with quite a huge advantage, including admission into Stanford, innate ambition, and aptitude for the sciences, whose worst instincts and greatest traumas are ignored, encouraged, or exploited by the people closest to her. As she gets older, though, The Dropout is keen on showing the ways in which Holmes refuses to allow the few people who do have her best interests at heart—including Gardner and Theranos chemist Ian Gibbons—to hold her accountable. In the series, Holmes is not merely a victim of money-hungry investors and scientific ignorance, but a driver of her own moral failure.

What emerges is a portrait of an increasingly powerful woman who relishes her place among a league of very powerful men, including Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison and Nixon administration diplomats George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. In the show, Gardner fixates on the idea that Holmes’s fraud will make it harder for women to found legitimate companies and advance scientific ideas on a global scale in the future. That may be true, but Holmes’s childhood neighbor and business nemesis Richard Fuisz ( William H. Macy )—who tipped off former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou about the Theranos scam—as characterized in the show, seems to understand the greater implications. Holmes’s hubris had the potential to ruin the lives of countless innocent and ailing people. For that, she had to be stopped.

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The Dropout: Limited Series Reviews

The Theranos story has been told many times in print, podcast and documentaries, which might make you wonder if another version was worth doing. Yes is the answer, mostly because of Seyfried’s performance and a slick execution overall.

Full Review | Apr 8, 2024

The rise and fall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes plays out over eight episodes in this nuanced and darkly comedic limited series.

Full Review | May 24, 2023

Seyfried wonderfully pinpointed all of Holmes’ unsettling quirks and dangerous ambitions.

Full Review | Dec 30, 2022

The Dropout confirmed that awful people can make interesting characters…

Full Review | Dec 28, 2022

In between founding a company at 19, becoming Silicon Valley’s darling in her twenties, and a convicted felon by 37, Elizabeth had enough ups and downs, triumphs and failures, intrigue and romance to make a compelling miniseries.

Full Review | Original Score: 7.5/10 | Aug 24, 2022

All this is solid, but what really breathes life into the show is Seyfried.

Full Review | Aug 11, 2022

The Dropout actually adds something substantive to the oceans of ink already spilled about Holmes and Theranos...

Full Review | Jul 9, 2022

Scam culture might be here to stay, but it isn't enough to just gawk its way — and The Dropout and its powerful take truly understands this.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2022

A near perfect series. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 17, 2022

The Dropout uses the tragic saga of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos to expose Silicon Valley’s exploitation of virtue, an American vice.

Full Review | May 13, 2022

Despite its strong lead performances, The Dropout is a seemingly lackluster series.

Full Review | Apr 17, 2022

Now that all 8 episodes have dropped on Hulu, this gangbuster of a series makes for a terrific binge. Because this story of true, brutal ambition is impossible to stop watching.

Full Review | Apr 10, 2022

In Amanda Seyfried, its difficult to imagine a better choice, as the Oscar-nominated performer not only captures the socially-stunted side of Holmes but the aggressively vile liar who lay at the center of the carefully crafted persona.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 9, 2022

This series does become extremely watchable, because you follow one persons journey from saying one lie to saying a bigger one, to then having to cover the first lie with a bigger one to not reveal the second.

Full Review | Original Score: Must Watch | Apr 6, 2022

Among the excellent play-by-play that the first seven episodes of The Dropout offer is a sense of how a lie this obscene could be supported by so many. More than most reconsiderations of scams it balances the origin of the lie without excusing it.

Full Review | Apr 5, 2022

If you need an eight-part limited series to sink your teeth into, be sure to shuffle this excellent production to the front of the pack.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 1, 2022

Seyfried does an incredible job of charting Holmes rise from ambitious, but nervous, newcomer to a confident, idiosyncratic grifter.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Mar 30, 2022

The Dropout is thoughtful and engrossing, if occasionally remote. If it stands above its contemporaries in the rising tide of scammer-centric shows, its largely because of Seyfrieds performance and the series no-frills execution.

Full Review | Mar 30, 2022

Theres a morbid curiosity surrounding her and public interest to watch her fail. Because of her crimes, we want to see her waxwings wane under the heat of the sun. We want to watch her plunge from the sky and we want to hear the splat.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2022

The Dropout never elides the fact that Elizabeth Holmes, and her crimes, stand alone. But its most daring assertion is that she is only the beginning.

Full Review | Mar 23, 2022

• Entertainment
• In a Season of Subpar Scammer Shows, Only <em>The Dropout</em> Is the Real Thing

In a Season of Subpar Scammer Shows, Only The Dropout Is the Real Thing

The Dropout wants us to understand that Elizabeth Holmes is a deeply bizarre human being. Before plunging into the saga of Theranos, the notorious multibillion-dollar startup Holmes founded that fooled the world into believing it could revolutionize blood testing, the docudrama’s creator, Elizabeth Meriwether ( New Girl ) immerses viewers in that strangeness. The show opens with glimpses of Elizabeth at various telling moments from throughout her life—parroting a Mandarin tape on a drive home from high school; bristling at reporters’ softball questions; determinedly flailing her way to the finish line of a race that she, as a child, has lost by at least a lap. “Why does she run so weird?” her little brother demands, from the bleachers.

Maybe this obsession with Holmes’ personality sounds petty, or sexist. But here’s the thing: Most people who are likely to watch The Dropout (premiering March 3 on Hulu) already know plenty of facts about Theranos. They’ve read John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup , watched the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley , listened to the ABC News podcast from which The Dropout was adapted, or simply followed seven years’ worth of news about the company’s downfall. Meriwether seems to understand what the creators of many other recent docudramas , from Showtime’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber to Hulu’s own Dopesick , do not—that no one comes to these shows for a summary of what happened. What we want is to understand the people behind the headlines.

To that end, The Dropout takes on three intertwined questions: Who is Elizabeth Holmes? What could she possibly have been thinking? And how did she get so many rich, powerful, and accomplished people to believe her lies for so long? Whereas previous portraits have fixated on Holmes’ beauty, her youth, her artificially lowered voice and those black Steve Jobs turtlenecks she appropriated as a uniform, Meriwether and the show’s star— Amanda Seyfried in her most challenging and perhaps greatest role to date—probe beyond that incongruous surface.

The story begins in earnest with Elizabeth’s father Chris Holmes (Michael Gill) getting laid off from an imploding Enron, around the same time that Elizabeth is accepted to Stanford. During an awkward Christmas visit, Chris humbles himself to the family’s wealthy friend Richard Fuisz (an amusingly peevish William H. Macy), a controversial physician and inventor, in hopes of securing financial help. But Richard and teenage Elizabeth immediately clash; each is a threat to the other’s monster ego. While she’s insulted at his suggestion that she must be a legacy at Stanford, he’s taken aback by her confidence. (“I want to be a billionaire,” she announces. “First step is Stanford, and then I’m gonna graduate, and I plan on inventing a product and start a company.”) Richard’s vendetta against her begins when she replies to his condescending offer to teach her a thing or two: “Don’t you just file patents so companies have to pay you off?”

Too focused on achievement to find common ground with her peers, Elizabeth—who is so methodical, she settles on an ideal window to lose her virginity and only then starts looking for a partner—finally meets someone who seems to understand her on a Mandarin immersion trip. Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (a brooding Naveen Andrews), a successful tech entrepreneur who’s nearly two decades Elizabeth’s senior, believes in her vision and knows how to make her feel safe. His experience as a South Asian man in post-9/11 America has left him aggrieved. In an industry dominated by white guys, his money and her WASP pedigree combine to lend the pair legitimacy. And although both their romantic relationship and Sunny’s role at Theranos, which Elizabeth abruptly leaves Stanford to found, remain ambiguously defined, what’s apparent in this telling is that their allegedly toxic symbiosis sustained the company when science could not.

With her fundamental weirdness as the constant, The Dropout foregrounds Holmes’ transformation from an anxious, socially inept yet laser-focused teen into a self-styled dynamo who learns to fake her way through the tech world by imitating the powerful men who initially dismiss her. In a series of wonderfully unselfconscious moments, Seyfried gives us Elizabeth psyching herself up or siphoning off excess emotion by dancing to early-’00s indie rock with fearsome intensity. Instead of getting her hands dirty in a lab whose results almost seem to disappoint, she rehearses koans—“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”—and collects affectations that signify she’s a Silicon Valley insider, from the dudebro voice and the turtlenecks to a mercurial temper and an enthusiasm for green juice.

Seyfried resists any temptation to exaggerate these eccentricities; the performance is subtle enough to surface human vulnerabilities that might otherwise have been obscured by the character’s behavior. It’s a refreshing choice, at a time when so many docudramas delight in mocking their subjects. Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes a fine transformation into Super Pumped ’s antihero, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, but all that comes through in the script is nonspecific Type A machismo. In Peacock’s Tiger King series Joe vs. Carole (also out March 3), Kate McKinnon ’s broad portrayal of Carole Baskin is more impression than likeness. NBC’s upcoming true-crime burlesque The Thing About Pam sticks Renée Zellweger in a fat suit to play Pam Hupp and deploys wry, condescending narration that cheapens real people’s suffering.

The Dropout doesn’t exist to pile on Holmes, whose public humiliation has been ongoing since the mid-2010s. But neither does it come across as a reclamation in the style of Inventing Anna , which attempts to reframe another famous female scammer, Anna Delvey, as a snobby feminist Robin Hood. Elizabeth is less a generic woman posturing her way through a man’s world than a misfit whose drive for professional success—the only objective her brain seems equipped to pursue—knows no bounds. Rather than embody some hollow girlboss archetype, she learns to use it to her advantage. Meriwether further resists a simplistic good-guys-vs.-bad-guys narrative by demonstrating how petty some of Elizabeth’s most vocal detractors, like Richard, can be.

By establishing who its subject is in early episodes, the show is able to weave in secondary characters, played by an extraordinary ensemble cast, that illustrate why it took more than a decade for Theranos to fail. Desperate to maintain their company’s relevance and gain social capital by partnering with the ostensibly cool tech crowd, a team of insecure, middle-aged Walgreens execs (including Succession ’s Alan Ruck) make a last-minute decision to ignore their many misgivings. Political eminence George Shultz (Sam Waterston) gets taken in by Elizabeth’s patrician background and laudable mission—plus a job opportunity for his grandson (Dylan Minnette). Eventual whistleblower Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-young Kim) initially submits to her superiors’ intimidation because she’s a working-class woman of color who fears being blacklisted. It turns out that the experiences of young women in tech aren’t monolithic.

The Dropout doesn’t escape every docudrama pitfall. It’s too long. It introduces so many characters that it can be hard, particularly if you’re not binging through the show, to keep track of which guys in suits you’re supposed to remember from one episode to the next. The dialogue occasionally errs toward the painfully expository or portentous. (“You don’t get to skip any steps,” Stanford professor Phyllis Gardner, played by the wonderful Laurie Metcalf, admonishes Elizabeth soon before the undergrad drops out to found Theranos.) Yet 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.

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The Dropout review – another mind-blowing portrait of a great American fraudster

Yes it’s clunky at points, but Amanda Seyfried excels as one-time billionaire grifter Elizabeth Holmes – and the story is simply too jaw-dropping to pass up

W e have barely had time to draw breath after the whirlwind anti-romance that was Inventing Anna, the story of super-grifter Anna Sorokin, who parlayed an innate grasp of upper-class manners into a life of plenty among the moneyed elite of New York (until they found out they were the ones funding it). Now we have The Dropout (Disney+), the story of the other great female fraudster of recent years, Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the medical company Theranos. It claimed it had developed technology that would revolutionise blood testing, and with it a massive part of the US healthcare system. In 2015, Forbes named Holmes the youngest self-made female billionaire in the country, after Theranos was valued at $9bn (£6.75bn). Her downfall, once rumours of fraud started circulating, was precipitate. She is now on bail awaiting sentencing for convictions for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Unlike Inventing Anna, which was a heady, soapy rush that enjoyed the glamour of its protagonist, and wasn’t too bothered by any need to investigate her motivations, The Dropout plays it straight. Possibly too straight – there are times when a little levity as the impossibilities mount would not go amiss – but all in the service of a story that blows your mind quite as comprehensively as Sorokin’s.

The storytelling is largely linear (a great relief after Inventing Anna’s back-and-forthing and the general fashion for importing tension via flashbacks and flash-forwards rather than actual writing). And so – brief opening scene of her giving a deposition before trial aside – we first meet Holmes as an 11-year-old child, running so slowly in a race that the rest of the runners have gathered at the finish line to wait, while the teacher begs her to give up. She does not, of course.

There we have the essence of our antihero and this eight-hour miniseries. One is determined to succeed, the other determined to make its messages clear every step of the way. See also: mother laboriously depicted as self-centred and cold; father better, but emphatically a vice-president at scandal-hit accountancy firm Enron. It hits every traditional beat: mapping out the origins of Holmes’s particular interest (mother’s fear of needles); a montage of rejections as she tries to get her initial funding; the disaster in the lab as the last potential investor rounds the corner; her mesmerised walk around the room as she arrives in her first luxury hotel suite as CEO (never mind that Holmes was from a wealthy, well-connected family and was, we may safely assume, well-used to hot water and gathered curtains).

So 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. Because – I’m sorry, did I not say? Tiny detail, often slipped the inventor’s mind, too – the technology did not work. Not properly. It worked a few times in a small way, just enough to give hope to those involved but, crucially, not on the day they showed it to investors. Holmes faked the results it apparently spewed out in front of them. From there, there was no going back.

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), which manages to keep in balance all the disparate elements of a woman who seems, by all accounts, to have been a very strange admixture. She was demonstrably clever but slow to realise the value of “soft” skills, blunt but charming, hyperfocused but chaotic. Seyfried makes it all work and keeps our attention – even our sympathy – as Holmes’s desperation to make a name for herself and prove that her intelligence and drive are worth something tangible slips further and further into corruption and lies.

Along the way, the show touches on issues that may have motivated Holmes to act the way she did – constantly proving herself the equal of the men at Stanford University, having to face down the tech bros of Silicon Valley, getting caught up with a manipulative older man, Sunny Balwani (played Naveen Andrews). But it doesn’t shy away from the fact that there was really only one person who built Theranos – from literally nothing, as it turned out – and who brought all $9bn of it down.

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The Dropout Hits the Scammer Sweet Spot

What do we want in a show about a scam? This year offers numerous opportunities to ask that question — Inventing Anna , WeCrashed , Super Pumped , Joe vs. Carole — but most of those series leave it unanswered, or answered in the negative (“I don’t know what I want in a scam show, but it’s not this ”). Part of the problem is that the scam show has too many points of appeal, and they’re all achingly obvious. Most of them are about recent, high-profile news stories, so there’s the real-life reenactment factor. They’re stories about money and power and, even better, money and power plus at least one person’s an idiot — sounds like a guaranteed home run! Then there’s the corporate-America aspect of it and the Robin Hood–esque rob-from-the-rich potential. All of them seem like such easy targets to hit. The trouble is that it’s also easy to be sloppy about it, to turn the prime scammer target into something muddled and unsatisfying. Too often, it feels like we’re being insufficiently scammed.

It turns out that what I want in a scam show is The Dropout , Hulu’s new series about Elizabeth Holmes, creator of the blood-testing company Theranos. None of it would work without the lead performance by Amanda Seyfried, who somehow conveys all of Holmes’s eccentricities and tics without begging for laughs or denying their absurdity. Her Holmes has elements of impersonation, but it’s much more an interpretation of the person and her motivations. She is someone who desperately wants success and can’t interrogate that within herself, someone who lacks empathy on the individual level but imagines things on a grand scale of sweeping social improvement, and someone who feels she can be comfortable in the world only if she remakes the world to fit herself.

A key ingredient in the recipe for any scam show is a central figure who has galvanized people’s attention and put on such a successful demonstration of competence that everyone has given them money. But a great scam show needs an element of portraiture to illuminate that principal scammer. If they’re just monsters, or if they’re given flashbacks to backfill motivation and shore up their current predicament, it all fits together too neatly. (There is no more boring form of character development than a straight, bold line drawn from one childhood event to an adult personality.) 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.

There are a few framing-device images of Holmes in CEO mode in the introductory episodes — the first three of which premiere this Thursday, followed by a weekly rollout — to remind us where we’re going, but for the most part, the series begins with Holmes as a young woman and then stays there for quite a while, allowing her to be shaped by multiple events and desires. High-school Holmes is already revving her engines for some massive entrepreneurial takeover, a desire she has long before she connects it to any specific area of innovation. She wants to be a huge, famous business-world star. At the same time, The Dropout refuses to oversimplify her ego. She longs for an undeniable position of power and ownership, and, yes, it is born out of both her idolatry of Steve Jobs and the humiliation of seeing her father in a precarious financial situation. It’s also just who she is, in some ineffable and inexplicable way. The Dropout registers this not just through Holmes but also in the way other people react to her: Her colleagues, her teachers, even her parents ping-pong back and forth between adoration and discomfort.

The Dropout ’s Holmes is a careful collage of so many traits. She is cruel and unthinking, driven, insecure, desperate, utterly self-interested, focused; she is also a hilariously basic white kid with her iPod cranked up to 100, singing songs primarily drawn from Apple ads and punching the air in frustration and triumph. The series includes Holmes’s account of being raped in college, and it spends a lot of energy in the relationship between Holmes and Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), her much older boyfriend–business partner–mentor–alleged abuser. All of it helps color Holmes and her world; none of it comes off as an excuse.

That delicate portraiture is where most scam shows falter and where The Dropout really pulls ahead of the competition. It also nails the snowballing sensation of the scam itself, the way Theranos begins as a sincere dream and slowly becomes a pile of lies and manipulation. Even when the house of cards stands tallest, The Dropout is careful to make clear that it’s all still supposedly in service of the admirable dream — it’s just also increasingly divorced from the damage caused by all that faking it until someone figures out how to make it.

The Dropout handles that transition from quixotic hopefulness into nightmarish denial so, so well. At the beginning, it’s almost a coming-of-age story in which the rising drama is less about what’s happening within the company and more about watching Holmes transform into herself. The decision to give us multiple scenes in which Holmes practices and experiments with her bizarre, artificially deep voice is particularly strong. Something that weird and mannered only works when you can see it being built from the ground floor.

This is another area in which The Dropout excels where so many scam shows fall short. It’s not a romp; it’s not a send-up of this goofy, wacky lady with her fake blood-testing and her black turtlenecks. But it’s not a bleak march to destruction, either. There is a perpetual, well-calibrated dance between acknowledging the gravity of this scammy company’s actions and allowing voices within the show to express how ridiculous Holmes has become. Some of that happens with music: The needle drops become a light form of commentary on these characters without tipping over into full, gratuitous winking at the audience. Even more of it happens on the level of the supporting characters, who are taken in by Holmes but also have opportunities to layer in humor. It helps that the supporting cast is all hits, no skips, especially thanks to Andrews, Laurie Metcalf, Stephen Fry, Elizabeth Marvel, LisaGay Hamilton, Kevin Sussman, and Alan Ruck. (This list could honestly have ten more names on it.)

The appeal of a great scam show extends beyond the scam or the show. In almost every instance, they are invitations to examine Americanism more broadly. Which aspect in particular depends a little on the scam: Inventing Anna is more about influencer culture and individual wealth; Joe vs. Carole gets into personal freedoms and the myth of mastery of one’s own domain; The Dropout is one of a trio of new shows about start-up culture, venture capital, and corporatism. But the desire to make that connection explicit often turns into something blunt, inept, or reductive. “Corporations are bad” is hardly news. “Weird people are weird!” is even less so. Without that gesture at something bigger, these shows can feel so hollow.

No scam show to date has negotiated this better than The Dropout . Holmes is idiosyncratic, and Theranos is its own distinct world of catastrophe, but the show also reflects ideas about American individualism and tech culture without making them so overt that it’s distracting. I would love to say that The Dropout is a blueprint for what scam shows should be, but I suspect that, much like a Theranos blood test, its results will be hard to replicate.

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'House of the Dragon' Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: In a Dragon Dogfight, Nobody Wins

'the boys' season 4 episode 6 recap: holy plot twist, tek knight, the 25 best tv shows of 2024 so far.

A handful of months after the release of Dopesick and mere weeks after premiering Pam & Tommy , Hulu continues its quest to leave no American scandal un-dramatized with The Dropout , an eight-episode miniseries tracking the rise and eventual downfall of Elizabeth Holmes. At the age of 19, Holmes dropped out of Stanford University and used her unspent college tuition to launch Theranos, a technology company that promised to revolutionize the healthcare industry with a new type of portable blood-testing machine. According to Theranos, these machines could offer a wide range of quick diagnoses based on a single drop of blood from a simple finger prick. The only problem? The technology didn’t actually work.

That didn’t stop Holmes and her enablers from lying their way to a $10 billion valuation, bilking investors, putting patients at risk, and making Holmes a CEO superstar in the process. In January, she was convicted of four counts of fraud and is currently awaiting sentencing, which could top out at 20 years in prison. The Dropout , based on a 2019 ABC News podcast covering the whole debacle, stars Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, an awkward but focused young woman who lays out her life goals pretty early on in the show: “I don’t want to be President,” she says. “I want to be a billionaire.”

The series begins with re-enacted clips of Holmes’ 2017 legal deposition (which are scattered throughout the series) but soon jumps back to 2002, when the story starts in earnest. Staying in Beijing for a pre-college Mandarin language program, Holmes has a tough time making friends but strikes up a relationship with Sunny Balwani ( Naveen Andrews ), a Pakistani man 19 years her senior who’s back in school working toward a Master’s degree after selling a company he founded for a small fortune. The two become friends, then lovers, and eventually business partners, with Sunny’s darker side becoming more and more apparent as the show goes on. Once back in the states, Holmes, who is obsessed with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and bright enough to persuade one of the professors at Stanford to become an early ally, soon trades in higher education for an ant-infested office where she begins charting her nascent company’s world-changing mission.

RELATED: 'The Dropout' Trailer Reveals Amanda Seyfried as Disgraced Billionaire Elizabeth Holmes in New Hulu Series

Seyfried does good work mimicking Holmes’ notably odd mannerisms, including an artificially deep voice that Holmes concocted to give herself a more authoritative presence. But showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether , who created one of the last decade’s better hang-out sitcoms in New Girl , and her team, which also includes director Michael Showalter ( The Eyes of Tammy Faye ), perhaps wisely don’t attempt to turn Holmes into a sympathetic figure. Sure, they offer a few suggestions for where Holmes’ initial inspirations and unrelenting drive might have come from – early scenes highlight her father’s breakdown after getting laid-off from Enron and both her and her mother’s distaste for long, blood-drawing needles – but The Dropout doesn’t show a ton of interest in doing a deep dive on Holmes’ psyche (which occasionally results in it feeling like Seyfried is playing less of a character and more of a vessel for corporate vapidness).

Instead, the series mostly treats Elizabeth like the eccentric central figure in a much larger tapestry, one which includes greedy venture capitalists, brilliant scientists eager to believe in her vision of a better world, healthcare CEOs looking to latch themselves onto the next big thing, and a small team of truth-seekers who, for one reason or another, want to expose Holmes and Balwani’s ever-growing mountain of lies. It’s a lot to cover, and the series (of which reviewers were given every episode save the finale) jams it all in by making massive – and sometimes jarring — multi-year time jumps from one episode to the next. It’s also fair to point out that the world of tech start-ups and the fat cats who invest in them isn’t necessarily as colorful as, say, Pam & Tommy ’s universe of neon-lit rock clubs and low-rent porn sets. But Merriweather and the other writers are able to put enough of a focus on some of the more fascinating people who were in Theranos’ orbit to hold the viewer’s interest, even when the story itself is moving through time at a faster rate than it’s advancing the plot. (Those blood-testing machines just keep on not working, and Holmes just keeps on lying about it, from one episode to the next.)

The series’ most sympathetic figure ends up being Ian Gibbons ( Stephen Fry ), an aging biochemist who beat cancer but was left with chronic foot pain caused by the treatment. Gibbons starts off as a true believer on Elizabeth’s team who hopes the tech they’re working on can save thousands of lives, but he slowly begins to realize his boss is putting her own reputation ahead of the company’s stated goals. Gibbons is one of several figures who were duped by Holmes’ grand vision and found their lives devastatingly disrupted by the Theranos scandal. Fry is excellent in The Dropout and gives perhaps the series’ most robust and soulful performance.

Other members of the show’s large cast don’t get material as meaty but still find ways to leave their mark on the proceedings. Alan Ruck ( Succession ) livens things up considerably when he arrives in the fourth episode as an eager-to-please, Katy Perry-quoting Walgreens exec who can’t wait to get into business with Holmes. Ebon Moss-Barchrach ( The Punisher ) and LisaGay Hamilton ( The Practice ) have a great rapport as a Wall Street Journal reporter and editor who team up for a story that could make or break their careers. Kurtwood Smith ( That ‘70s Show ) and Laurie Metcalf ( The Conners ) bring their considerable gravitas to small but flashy roles. And then there’s William H. Macy , sporting an early contender for most intentionally awful costuming wig of the year as he plays a cantankerous Holmes family friend who holds a grudge against Elizabeth for never coming to him for business advice.

The Dropout makes attempts at touching on some larger themes, including the extra challenges faced by women CEOs (along with the damage that can be caused when a successful one is revealed to be a con artist) and the pitfalls of an American system of capitalism that’s more concerned about potential windfalls than honest results. Holmes standing in line for the launch of the first iPhone is one of several scenes that show how corporations and their CEOs can inspire a cult-like devotion in this modern, tech-driven age. But The Dropout refuses to ever fully lock on to a clear mission statement of its own, instead dutifully plowing through the facts of the case — not entirely unlike the various articles, documentaries, and podcasts that have already covered the Theranos scandal.

Because of that, it’s ultimately worth asking: Is The Dropout even necessary? But this is 2022, where umpteen streaming services need to be steadily delivering content to their subscribers, so 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 Dropout premieres with its first three episodes on March 3 exclusively on Hulu, with new episodes released weekly thereafter.

• The Dropout

‘The Dropout’ Shows How Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes’ Blood Ran Cold

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

“I believed in her,” chemist Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry) says of tech mogul Elizabeth Holmes ( Amanda Seyfried ) midway through the Hulu docudrama The Dropout . “I looked in her eyes and I thought… I thought I could see the future.”

Ian is far from the only person to believe this of Holmes, whose company, Theranos, promised to revolutionize health care with a device, the Edison, that would run multiple tests from a single drop of blood. The cult of personality around the black-clad young woman helped attract heavyweights like former secretary of state George Shultz (Sam Waterston) to the company’s board, and The Dropout digitally inserts Seyfried into clips of the real Holmes being lauded by Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.

But Holmes was a fraud who could never get her miracle machine to work — and managed to keep this fact hidden for years from board members, investors, and eventually from the very real people who were relying on Theranos’ creation to inform their medical decisions.

Between The Dropout , Netflix’s con-woman tale Inventing Anna , Showtime’s Uber origin story Super Pumped , and Apple’s upcoming WeWork miniseries WeCrashed , 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. (Even Anna Delvey spends an episode of Inventing Anna helping her boyfriend pitch his dream-journal app.) At one point here, Holmes quotes Mark Zuckerberg’s famous “move fast and break things” mantra, and The Dropout continually illustrates how easy it is to break things and how hard it is to get them right.

Revelation-wise, there’s little that’s new in The Dropout , especially if you listened to the podcast of the same name that inspired it. But showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether and Seyfried do an excellent job of unpacking how Holmes slipped into con artistry, step by step, and how she managed to fool so many people for so long. Meriwether is best known for creating the Fox sitcom New Girl , which at first might seem an odd match for a ripped-from-the-headlines account like this. But throughout, it’s not hard to view The Dropout as a tale of adorkability’s dark side. In early scenes set around the time Holmes began attending Stanford, Seyfried plays her(*) as enthusiastic but socially challenged — “I don’t feel things the way other people feel things,” she admits later to Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), the much older man she falls for on a trip to China — and an idealist who believes she can make the world a better place. (We also get a reminder early on that corporate chicanery didn’t exactly originate in Silicon Valley, as Elizabeth’s father is working as an executive at Enron when that company goes bankrupt over accounting fraud.) When she’s alone, she’s fond of dancing and/or singing with awkward abandon, and she dreamed up the Edison in part out of her own fear of getting her blood drawn. And on a sadly ironic note, she can’t get anyone to believe her after she’s raped by a fellow student, though she would soon be able to pull the wool over the eyes of powerful men like Shultz or venture capitalist Don Lucas (Michael Ironside), continually covering for the failures of the Edison.

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(*) Originally, Kate McKinnon was set to play Holmes, but she dropped out before filming began. (Those needing a true-crime fix with her will have to wait for Joe vs. Carole , Peacock’s scripted version of the Tiger King story. ) 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. They don’t necessarily invite you to root for the Theranos team, but they have fun showing the mechanics of how Holmes and her cronies pulled off various deceptions. The fourth episode, aptly titled “Old White Men,” is a particular treat, with Alan Ruck playing a Walgreens executive desperate to combat his fears of aging and irrelevance by teaming up with this exciting new venture, and Rich Somer from Mad Men as a consultant crying in vain that the empress has no clothes.

After a while, though, Holmes becomes less a believer in the project than in her own rising celebrity. Yes, Seyfried does the voice — the improbably deep register, halting cadence and all — but in a much more interesting and convincing way than Julia Garner mimicking Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna . Part of the trick is that she doesn’t start out so deep, but rather takes it on as an affectation — a way for the confrontation-averse Holmes to feel like she should be the one giving orders to employees who keep pushing back about problems with the Edison. And as she learns to take control, she starts to become dangerous, and The Dropout pivots into more of a horror story, showing Holmes and Balwani’s ruthless attempts(*) to silence potential whistleblowers like Ian, Shultz’s grandson Tyler (Dylan Minnette), or new employee Erika (Camryn Mi-young Kim). Throughout, Meriwether and chief director Michael Showalter hurl an army of familiar character actors like Fry and Waterston at Holmes to capture just how easy it was for everyone to fall under her spell.

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(*) 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. 

The first three episodes of The Dropout premiere March 3 on Hulu, with additional installments streaming weekly. I’ve seen seven of the eight episodes.

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‘The Dropout’: Amanda Seyfried right on the money as the tech world’s billion-dollar swindler

Hulu’s take on the crooked theranos founder elizabeth holmes is the best of the current wave of true-crime limited series..

Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) builds a company around a revolutionary medical device that doesn’t work in “The Dropout.”

Forget about Anna Delvey from “Inventing Anna” or Simon Leviev aka “The Tinder Swindler.” They’re small potatoes compared to Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy, as we’re reminded in the new Hulu limited series “The Dropout,” easily the best of the current wave of true-crime limited series.

With the first three episodes already streaming and subsequent chapters premiering weekly, this is an immensely entertaining and easily digestible chronicle of true-life events — and a fascinating psychological profile of a bizarre huckster and her breathtakingly wide-ranging long con, in which she duped scientists, investors and institutions, in the process becoming a media darling as a young, female tech “unicorn” smashing the glass ceiling. In 2014, Holmes was named one of the richest women in America by Forbes, with an estimated personal wealth of $4.5 billion; by 2018, her net worth was $0 and the SEC had charged her with “massive fraud,” which eventually resulted in four convictions.

The story of Holmes and her monumental failures with the blood-testing enterprise Theranos has been thoroughly chronicled via just about every platform imaginable, and yet there’s something lively and fresh about “The Dropout.” With Amanda Seyfried in a career-best performance, brilliant supporting work from the expansive supporting cast, crisp writing and first-rate production values, this is the real thing — unlike the sham medical technology Holmes peddled (and sold) to people who should have known better.

“The Dropout” kicks off with Holmes giving a deposition in July of 2017, flashes back to a few telling moments from Holmes’ youth — gamely completing a race long after everyone else has long since crossed the finished line, learning Mandarin on tape on the ride home from high school — before picking up the story in the early 2000s, with Elizabeth about to enter Stanford just as her father Chris (Michael Gill) is getting laid off from the collapsing Enron. With the help of a family friend, the eccentric and perpetually resentful physician and inventor Richard Fuisz (William H. Macy), Elizabeth will still be able to attend Stanford, but first she takes a trip to Beijing, where she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (Naveen Andrews), a millionaire tech entrepreneur nearly twice her age.

Once Elizabeth enrolls in Stanford, she becomes highly impatient with the natural progression of things. She’s tightly wound, bursting with creative energy and laser focused on becoming the next Steve Jobs, and she bristles when potential mentors such as the esteemed Professor Phyllis Gardner (Laurie Metcalf) tell her she should just enjoy being a 19-year-old freshman. “You don’t get to skip any steps,” says Gardner.

Rarely has such solid advice been so quickly dismissed.

Elizabeth comes up with a revolutionary idea: a portable diagnostic device that would require just a single drop of blood to provide near-instant analysis, which would greatly reduce the costs of testing and potentially save millions of lives through early detection. This is not the kind of idea that will wait for all those steps Professor Gardner talked about; it’s too grand, too important, too much of a game-changer, and the time for action is now! Elizabeth drops out of Stanford, convinces her parents to pour all of her tuition money into Theranos and begins rounding up personnel to staff the lab while she courts investors.

At this point, Seyfried as Holmes looks and acts the part of a super-bright but unsophisticated teenager, from her dance-to-iPod-music energy to her ultra-casual clothes to her girlish speaking voice. But as Theranos grows in scope and ambition, Elizabeth undergoes a remarkable and at times chilling self-makeover, from her trademark black-on-black fashion to her brutal treatment of employees to the evolution of her voice to the point where she almost sounds as if she’s imitating a man. Seyfried’s manipulation of Elizabeth’s vocal delivery is nothing short of amazing, as it never comes across as mere imitation. (In one of many intense exchanges with Sunny, who has become Elizabeth’s financial and romantic partner, Elizabeth unconsciously toggles back and forth between her two voices, depending on whether they’re arguing about business or their personal lives.)

Naveen Andrews plays Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, a tech millionaire who becomes Holmes’ financial and romantic partner.

Indelible characters abound as Holmes rounds up hundreds of millions of dollars in investments and becomes globally famous — even as the prototype for the device fails again and again. (And again.) National treasure Sam Waterston plays political giant George Shultz, who leads the clout-heavy board and becomes a grandfather figure to Elizabeth. Camryn Mi-young Kim shines as the promising new employee Erika Cheung, who idolizes Elizabeth until she discovers the whole operation is a sham and now must decide whether to become a whistle-blower. Alan Ruck is in peak Alan Ruck-mode as a hapless Walgreen executive who desperately wants to believe in Theranos. The great Stephen Fry lends heart and humanity to the story as a beloved, cancer-stricken chemist whose life is ruined when he starts questioning the science.

We’re amazed that so many educated, worldly, tech-savvy and financially acute parties would fall for Holmes’ ruse, often committing huge amounts of money and staking their reputations on a technology they’ve never actually seen work — because it doesn’t work. 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.

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The Dropout on Hulu makes an unconvincing case for Elizabeth Holmes’ humanity

Amanda seyfried stars as theranos founder elizabeth holmes.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was a subject of fascination within Silicon Valley and the tech press even before her eventual downfall and recent conviction for defrauding investors . But Hulu’s The Dropout is confident there are still people out there dying to know more about the woman behind the disruptive medtech unicorn that could have been.

Adapted from ABC News’ investigative true crime podcast of the same name hosted by Rebecca Jarvis, and produced by Taylor Dunn and Victoria Thompson, The Dropout chronicles Holmes’ (Amanda Seyfried) journey from being just another Stanford dropout with a half-baked dream to becoming one of the most infamous American CEOs of the 21st century. 

Like the podcast, the new Hulu show — which Jarvis, Dunn, and Thompson co-executive produced along with series director Michael Showalter —  sets out to both entertain and inform as it lays out a timeline of events beginning in Holmes’ childhood and culminating in 2015 as The Wall Street Journal ’s Theranos reporting began to expose the company’s troubles. Though The Dropout ’s dramatization of past events pulls heavily from the podcast’s reporting, the show is far more comfortable editorializing with a story that somewhat sympathetically frames Holmes not simply as a visionary-turned-fraudster, but also as a woman navigating the treacherous and broadly sexist world of multimillion-dollar tech startups.

Much like Holmes herself, The Dropout is as focused as it is busy. Its first few episodes jump back and forth in time between various moments from Holmes’ past, and in 2017 as she’s being deposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of being charged in 2018 . After opening on Seyfried’s nervous tick-driven Holmes at a point when the public still took the carefully-constructed idea of Elizabeth Holmes, blood wunderkind , at face value, The Dropout tries to make you understand how she got there by zeroing in on important chapters from her past that she carried into the future. 

Much like Holmes herself,  The Dropout  is as focused as it is busy

The Dropout suggests the root of Holmes’ ambition and fixation with money is her relationships with her somewhat overbearing mother Noel (Elizabeth Marvel) and father Chris (Michel Gill), a recently laid-off Enron vice president. As the Holmes family’s pre-Theranos money troubles begin to loom, their uneasy competition with neighbor Richard Fuisz (William H. Macy), a physician and inventor who expresses interest in learning more about Elizabeth’s nascent work, intensifies and The Dropout presents all of these as major data points necessary to understanding the sort of person Holmes becomes.

The true focus of The Dropout is exploring the circumstances of Holmes’ life and her relationships as a commentary on the culture that gave birth to the concept of $1 billion unicorns.  The Dropout creates the impression it’s that same culture that pushes Holmes to study abroad in Beijing where she meets Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (Naveen Andrews), a man nearly two decades her senior, with whom she forges an awkward friendship that evolves into an unsettling and sometimes violent romantic and working relationship as the series progresses. 

Though each of The Dropout ’s big plot points is based in reality, because the show weaves them all together into a singular narrative, it can read as the continued mythologization of Holmes — here set to a soundtrack of early-aughts hits like Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead” and Feist’s “1234.”

Fuisz and Balwani are just two of the older, powerful men who come into Holmes’ life either looking to challenge or take advantage of her in some way. And while The Dropout doesn’t depict them as being part of a grand nefarious project working to take Holmes down, it does make a point of highlighting how figures like them have been ever-present in her story. This is what makes The Dropout both somewhat dubious as an account of how Holmes got into a life of white-collar crime, and kind of interesting as a takedown of Silicon Valley itself as it begins to surrender to the Jobsian distortions of reality emanating from Theranos HQ.

The Dropout far more interested in exploring Holmes’ life to comment on Silicon Valley culture

The Dropout takes a good long while before it trains its focus on specific bits of deception and manipulation Holmes used to convince people like Stanford professor Channing Robertson (Bill Irwin), economist George Schultz (Sam Waterston), and biochemist Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry) to trust her. In doing so, the show uses its supporting cast to illustrate the degree to which people were willing to enable Holmes — sometimes knowingly — in order to feel better about themselves or to support causes larger than any of them as individuals, like the push to combat misogyny in tech. Because of this, though, The Dropout often feels as if it’s handling Holmes’ story with kid gloves, and only feels comfortable being critical of her in moments that lend themselves to depicting her as cartoonishly-awkward and inept at interacting with other people.

For all the punches that The Dropout ’s script seems like it’s pulling, Seyfried’s performance hits hard: she churns out a studied barrage of Holmes’ quirks much in the same way that Theranos’ malfunctioning machines spit out blood. Though everyone’s going to be fixated on the sound of Seyfried’s take on Holmes’ voice , what’s infinitely more fascinating (and telling about the show) is how the voice is first introduced, and how it goes on to wax and wane like the Scarlet Witch’s Sokovian lilt . Rather than just speculating about whether Holmes affects her speaking voice, The Dropout presents her tone, as well as her mannerisms and fashion sense, as modular aspects of her identity that she haphazardly learns to swap out in efforts to impress people.

As odd as Seyfried’s Holmes looks and sounds standing in front of a mirror while practicing phrases using the lower register of her speaking voice, The Dropout also tries to underline how that kind of reinvention of the self is something that nearly everyone does — especially those trying to succeed in professional settings where people like them have been historically shut out. Just as the show begins to broach his idea a bit more deeply through its depiction of early Theranos hire Ana Arriola (Nicky Endres), The Dropout sort of drops it in favor portraying all of Holmes’ eccentricities — like lying to investors — as reflexive defenses that spring up in response to pressure and fear .

The Dropout never goes so far as to say that Holmes isn’t responsible for her actions. But it does ask you to wonder with whom culpability lies in an industry where faking it until one makes it is how many successful people have played the game. These are things worth reflecting on, but as you get deeper into The Dropout ’s eight episodes, the show feels increasingly hesitant to let itself and the audience slow down and sit with how bad things became at Theranos under Holmes’ supervision .

When you look at The Dropout as part of the larger constellation of Holmes-related media that’s come out over the past few years, it’s hard to say what exactly the show brings in terms of new insight or clarity into Holmes’ thinking. As a piece of entertainment tailor-made for Hollywood’s current obsession with true crime podcasts shot through with a very two-dimensional strain of white feminism , however, The Dropout makes perfect sense.

The Dropout also stars Anne Archer, Michaela Watkins, Kate Burton, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Michael Ironside, Laurie Metcalf, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Kevin Sussman, LisaGay Hamilton, and Kurtwood Smith. The series hits Hulu on March 3rd.

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The Dropout review: A vanilla-flavoured version of an amazing story

It's seemingly impossible to make the Theranos scandal boring – although this miniseries comes close at times.

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The story of convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and her health technology company Theranos is one of the most shocking business scandals since the turn of the millennium – making it fertile ground for dramatisation. The Stanford University dropout and Steve Jobs wannabe promised to revolutionise healthcare with a device that could run dozens of tests on a single drop of blood. Investors and journalists alike fell head over heels for what she was selling, with the only problem being that the tech simply didn't exist.

Amanda Seyfried takes the lead role of disgraced CEO Holmes, marking her most high-profile gig since becoming an Academy Award nominee with 2020 biopic Mank . Alas, it seems hard to imagine this performance earning the same degree of attention. Mercifully, this isn't the goofy SNL impersonation that original star Kate McKinnon would have provided (see Joe vs Carole for a chilling glimpse at what could have been), but rarely does it feel like an authentic portrayal either.

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In a bid to closer resemble her subject, Seyfried distractingly attempts to contort her face in such a way that accentuates her jawline, while she also struggles to maintain the (reportedly false) baritone voice that was such a huge part of Holmes' public persona. Overall, it's an uneven performance which lacks the magnetism that allowed this entrepreneur to accrue hundreds of millions of dollars from investors without ever having a fully operational prototype.

In Seyfried's defence, she's working with a shallow script that doesn't offer any real insights into what was driving Holmes' incomprehensible and callous deception. In lieu of any complex character study, we get a few light-hearted dance numbers (set to a seemingly random assortment of pop songs) that feel like a lazy attempt to humanise the former billionaire without actually saying anything of substance. The direction is similarly flat, presenting the show in a by-the-numbers format with little in the way of visual flair.

Indeed, watching The Dropout gave me renewed appreciation for another of Hulu's recent factual dramas Dopesick , which adopted an unconventional multi-timeline narrative structure. If at times this was a little disorienting, it succeeded in keeping its key players relevant across all eight episodes, despite their roles in the story being separated by several years. By comparison, the less ambitious approach taken here means that characters drop in and out of this story very abruptly, oftentimes before we've had a chance to grow attached to them.

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That might be representative of the culture at the now defunct Theranos, but it doesn't make for very compelling storytelling. It's a great shame too as there are some strong performances here that simply aren't given enough time to shine, with standouts including Laurie Metcalf as Dr Phyllis Gardner and LisaGay Hamilton as fictionalised Wall Street Journal editor Judith Baker. Most disappointing of all is the lack of focus on Stephen Fry's Dr Ian Gibbons, as anyone familiar with the true events will know him to be a tragic figure, whose story deserves to be handled more deftly than it is here.

It's strange that there would be a shortage of time for anyone as the early chapters of The Dropout feel rather slow-paced, spending too much time on the origins of Theranos and a dispute with Holmes' childhood neighbour Richard Fuisz (portrayed here by William H Macy). Besides Seyfried, only Naveen Andrews gets an ample amount of screen time as business partner and secret lover Sunny Balwani, with the romantic chemistry between the two being convincing enough (albeit not particularly steamy).

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. Indeed, if Seyfried and co's uninspired choices can't make the Theranos story boring then presumably nothing can – which bodes well for Adam McKay and Jennifer Lawrence's upcoming stab (or should that be finger prick?) at a feature film retelling.

The Dropout premieres on Disney Plus on Thursday 3rd March. You can sign up to Disney Plus for £7.99 a month or £79.90 a year now. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.

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The Dropout review: Elizabeth Holmes drama lacks subtlety but is more viable than anything Theranos ever produced

Amanda seyfried deftly conveys the brittleness of holmes’s fake-it-till-you-make-it demeanour, but the series is slightly let down by foreshadowing, blunt symbolism, article bookmarked.

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On the small screen, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of misguided tech geniuses. We’ve just seen Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Uber’s ultra-driven former CEO Travis Kalanick in Super Pumped, and next month Jared Leto will star as Messianically complex WeWork founder Adam Neumann in WeCrashed. But before that comes the sorry tale of Theranos ’s duplicitous wunderkind, Elizabeth Holmes . Adapted from the hit podcast, The Dropout sees Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried donning the turtleneck and dropping her voice an octave (or two), in order to become the woman whose mysterious downfall has captivated the world for the past couple of years.

In a nutshell, The Dropout picks the Elizabeth Holmes story up in the sun-tinged days of childhood innocence, before rapidly accelerating through a tale of success and failure, rise and fall. “This is Google, this is Yahoo, but this is better,” Holmes tells her audience, “this is gonna help people.” The show’s McGuffin is Theranos’s Edison machine; a tiny, sleek box that, with just a prick of your finger, could offer a huge range of medical diagnoses. Except it couldn’t, of course. This is one thread of The Dropout ; a story of hubristic delusion.

The other thread is the troubled romance between Seyfried’s Holmes, and the much older businessman, Sunny Balwani, played by Lost ’s Naveen Andrews. He’s clever, charming and rich, but creepily obsessed with this charismatic teenage girl he meets on a Mandarin exchange programme. It’s Balwani’s personal tragedy, the death of his father after failed diagnostics, that inspires Holmes, as does his tendency to rationalise the obsessive pursuit of money. “Nobody thinks you’re a terrorist when you drive a Lamborghini,” he tells her.

Seyfried manages to convey the brittleness of Holmes’s fake-it-till-you-make-it demeanour, and copes admirably with the challenge of bringing the character from adolescence through to adulthood. She also has a doe-eyed innocence that speaks to the series’ most complex question: was Holmes actually a victim? Is this one of those villain origin stories, much loved in Hollywood of late, where benign ambitions and real grievances lead a person astray? “I don’t want to be president, I want to be a billionaire,” she tells her family. “It’s not just about the money,” Holmes says, “you have to have a purpose.” Orbiting around Seyfried’s central performance is an all-star cast: William H Macy, terrifying, as inventor Richard Fuisz; Laurie Metcalf, reliably stern, as pharmacologist Phyllis Gardner; and Stephen Fry, avuncular, as the doomed biochemist Ian Gibbons.

The subtlety of The Dropout ’s position on Holmes is not matched by the subtlety of the show in any other department. It has all the smoothed down edges of an iMac, or an Edison machine. In one early scene, the teenage Holmes dances to Alabama’s “I’m in a Hurry (And Don’t Know Why)” while staring at a poster of Steve Jobs. In another, Holmes and Balwani, quite literally, burn some money, igniting it in a semi-spiritual process, a sequence so on-the-nose it might as well be a pair of pince-nez.

Later scenes involve Holmes being led further astray, by the corrupting influences of power and money (at one point, she stands on the bow of a yacht owned by Oracle’s Larry Ellison, played by Hart Bochner, and the two of them yell “get the f***ing money!” at the waves) and the increasingly overbearing Balwani. Despite interlacing episodes with testimony from Holmes’s eventual deposition, especially when it contrasts with the truth of the drama as it plays out for us, the show is at times conspicuously economical with what it does, and does not, render on-screen. Some incidents, such as Holmes’s claim that she was raped in college, are played deliberately ambiguously. But others, such as her allegations of assault against Balwani, are presented in a clearer light. The result is a sense that the show isn’t playing quite as fair as it thinks it is.

The final product is, ultimately, more viable than anything Theranos ever produced. Anchored by Seyfried’s charmingly vulnerable central performance, and assisted by the comedy chops of executive producers like New Girl ’s Elizabeth Meriwether 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.

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The Dropout review: An overlong Theranos investigation that's somehow too late and too soon

Did you know Elizabeth Holmes liked to dance? Who the hell cares?

Can we make the four-part miniseries a thing? Every limited TV event I've seen lately would benefit from further limiting. Take The Dropout , Hulu's erratic relitigation of the Theranos scandal, which debuts March 3. In the meandering drama, Amanda Seyfried does her best trailer voice as Silicon monster Elizabeth Holmes. It takes three hours to get to the juiciest phase of Holmes' vampiric con job. Things really start to move in episode 7, which must be the worst thing you can read in a TV review.

Seyfried has to play Holmes from teenage ambition through young adult fame and thirtysomething disgrace. It's the lamest structure of soup-to-nuts storytelling, just one damn thing after another, with precious little insight into its confounding central character. Her company promised a medical breakthrough in painless blood testing, offering a full biological readout from one single drop. It was all a lie, though inflated Valley rhetoric might prefer a softer term — "prospective truth," or "theoretically eventual fact." The premiere introduces Elizabeth at every point in her time continuum. Here's the CEO at the magazine-cover apex, barely blinking as she preaches her billion-dollar biotech gospel. Here's the infamous liar caught on tape mid-testimony.

And then The Dropout settles in for a leisurely tour through her personal history, from '90s family melodrama through college into the big money Bay Area tech scene. Elizabeth seems bred into the entrepreneur caste, surrounded by great fortune and potential failure. Her father (Michael Gill) walks home one day to announce he just lost his job at freaking Enron. The family seeks financial assistance from their sorta friend Richard Fuisz ( William H. Macy ), a wealthy man with at least one spare house and a boiling reaction to social slights. Later, in a Mandarin immersion program, Elizabeth meets Sunny Balwani ( Naveen Andrews ), a charismatic brainiac who casually mentions that time he sold his company for 40 million dollars.

For her part, Elizabeth wants to be a billionaire and idolizes Steve Jobs' universe-denting role as a celebrity executive messiah. The first three episodes comprise an Elizabeth Holmes origin story, moving past her time at Stanford to the sleeping-bag-in-the-office phase of her start-up career. Her relationship with Sunny deepens right alongside her devotion to her company. Cheerful biochemist Ian Gibbons ( Stephen Fry ) promises Elizabeth her futuristic vision will come true while reminding her that you can't rush science. Then the money starts running out. More funding is necessary, so the statistics get fuzzy. Phony tests get performed on genuine patients. At a certain point, the truth just seems to stop mattering for the Theranos investors and employees. This thing could be the next Google; who cares if the numbers get pulled out of their anos?

Executive producer Liz Meriwether seems to be trying out different explanations for Holmes' deceit. She has noble ambitions and doesn't want to run out of money. She worries her status as a female CEO amidst the dudebrocracy requires absolute perfection. She actually believes her researchers are perpetually thisclose to a final breakthrough. (A reported campus assault is a pivotal, if somewhat oblique, event in the premiere.) Seyfried's vaguely Vulcan performance prints the legend of Holmes' torpedo intensity, without quite embodying any of these dramatic possibilities. I worry the show underrates the simple possibility that it's fun to get rich and powerful very quickly by telling lies.

I also think the why here is just much less interesting than the what . Theranos snowball rolls into a billion-dollar phenomenon. The company earns institutional credibility. Major corporations and grumpy old men desperately seek Elizabeth's approval. One whole episode focuses on Theranos' courtship of Walgreens; I mean it as a compliment when I say that episode could have been cut down into a very good 5-minute sequence. "I met Rupert Murdoch tonight at the thing!" Elizabeth exclaims at one point, which captures the general screechy-biopic tenor of the dialogue. (Another chestnut: "What are they calling you these days? The millennials?" Even funnier because the person is speaking in 2002.)

Meriwether has a long sitcom track record, and hallowed Wet Hot American Summer Michael Showalter alum directs key episodes. Theranos is certainly a funny story, in a modern-capitalism-is-anti-human sort of way. But 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. Her relationship with Sunny is a matter of courtroom ambiguity at this point, though I do think Andrews may just be too dashing to really nail the onscreen character's descent into Orwellian creep.

The show gets better when it shifts focus to the other people caught in the web. Sam Waterston runs his gravitas off a cliff as George Shultz, the Nixon-Reagan grandee who becomes Holmes' sternest defender. Kurtwood Smith is a preening delight as brash mega-lawyer David Boies. Fry is quietly charming and then devastating. Meanwhile, after years of complex lawsuits, Elizabeth's old family friend Richard winds up leading a kind of anti-Theranos superteam, joining forces with skeptical professor Phyllis Gardner (Laurie Metcalf, righteous as ever) while Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) tries to find the truth behind the hype.

The real-life Carreyrou was hounded in every direction. (His boss' boss' boss' boss was, of course, Theranos investor Rupert Murdoch.) Much of the material around him feels overly composited, though. Worth pointing out that Carreyrou wrote the (great) Holmes text Bad Blood . That IP's already claimed for an upcoming Adam McKay movie starring Jennifer Lawrence, which seemed much more enticing before Adam McKay and Jennifer Lawrence ever made a movie together. After so many listless Dropout hours, I have the sense that it may just be too soon and too late for all these new Elizabeth Holmes stories. Time may provide more perspective, but right now her legend is freakshow fodder for podcasts, documentaries, and memes. This blood's gone bad. C

Related content:

• Amanda Seyfried suits up as Theranos found Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout first look
• Amanda Seyfried to play Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu series, replacing Kate McKinnon
• A guide to all the Elizabeth Holmes content you can watch, read, and listen to

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‘The Dropout’: Amanda Seyfried nails Elizabeth Holmes, but series still clouds her mystery

What fresh hell it must be working at a tech startup.

At least, that’s the way movies and TV series depict it, from as far back to “The Social Network,”  my favorite film of 2010, to Showtime's new “ Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber ."  Most of them focus on hyper-driven visionaries, who have no time for such niceties as decent human behavior, embarking on a quest to get their ideas to market. They make millions, even billions, while losing their soul and, not for nothing, friends and family along the way.

Dramatizing these true-life stories presumably gives us a glimpse of the humanity of these creators, as well as some background on why they behave the way they do.

The latest in this line is “The Dropout,” (★★ ½ out of four), an eight-part series about Elizabeth Holmes  now streaming weekly  on Hulu.

Amanda Seyfried stars as Elizabeth Holmes

Holmes founded Theranos and was recently convicted of lying to the company’s investors, which is only a spoiler if you haven’t looked at a newspaper or website in the last couple of years. “The Dropout,” based on the ABC News podcast, follows the typical pattern of the other tech stories in some respects, but it’s got a big asset in its favor: Amanda Seyfried. She absolutely nails the mysterious – some would say affected and others weird – aura Holmes presents, from her look to her voice to the maniacal devotion to her work.

And after the seven episodes Hulu provided for review, Holmes still remains something of a mystery.

The series begins with Holmes’ deposition, which gives you a pretty major hint of the direction and frames some of the episodes, which otherwise proceed in chronological order through Holmes’ life.

Her mom (Elizabeth Marvel) is a passive-aggressive sort who clearly intends to micromanage Elizabeth’s life. That doesn’t really work out. Holmes is driven from the start – she wants to be a billionaire.

The story of Holmes and her startup, Theranos

She goes to Stanford, where she manages to get into graduate courses as a freshman. She has no social life – that won’t change – but goes to a party and is raped. The school takes no action, and she drops out, though not because of that (or not just because of that, she says). She convinces her parents to invest her tuition money in the company she's starting, Theranos.

Holmes has hit upon an idea: a machine that will test a patient’s blood, using a single drop. The idea will go through some alterations and the technology definitely will, but that remains the goal. Holmes manages to convince a lot of people to give her a lot of money; the board includes George Schultz (Sam Waterston), who served as the U.S. secretary of State and secretary of the Treasury. His influence is crucial.

His grandson Tyler (Dylan Minnette) will be even more important to the story. He works in the lab at Theranos; he and Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-Young Kim) know what the investors do not: Namely, that the technology doesn’t work.

Which doesn’t stop Theranos from deploying the tests, including in several Walgreens stores in Arizona . That real patients received inaccurate test results doesn’t seem to faze Holmes. Luckily, other people around her had more of a conscience, including Tyler Schultz and Cheung.

Naveen Andrews is a jerk as Holmes' romantic partner

Early on, Holmes meets Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), who works with her and becomes her romantic partner. Holmes testified that Balwani tried to control her life, down to what she ate and wore, and there’s some of that here.

But mostly he’s just a jerk, which (it is implied and even stated) someone has to be to keep moving forward with tech startups. Whether that’s true is debatable – one hopes not. But there’s plenty of it going on at Theranos.

Holmes grows increasingly evasive and eventually downright deceptive about the technology as she tries to lure investors – and keep the ones she’s got. Alan Ruck brings a lot of his goofball “ Succession ” energy to the role of a Walgreens doctor desperate to believe in Holmes, as were so many.

But Holmes cuts more people out of her life and the company, including chemist Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry, excellent), a move that will prove fateful.

Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is on the trail of the fraud, and at least gives the audience someone to root for.

Executive producer and showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether keeps the science relatively simple. It’s Seyfried’s performance that’s complex, if at times indecipherable. But maybe that’s an accurate portrayal of Holmes. She is driven to a fault, incapable of accepting anything but winning.  What winning entails among so much loss and lying, however, remains a mystery.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, the dropout offers conflicting views of controversial woman.

Who is Elizabeth Holmes, exactly? Over the course of the last decade, she’s been a lot of things: Tech genius, business guru, girlboss, pioneer, fraud, con-woman, pariah. When she burst onto the scene as a twentysomething wunderkind and the eccentric leader of multi-billion-dollar medical startup Theranos, her quirks made her feel unique—her baritone voice, penchant for green juice and black turtlenecks, and unblinking, thousand-yard stare simply read as the Jobs-ian tics of your average Silicon Valley trailblazer. Then, of course, we learned it was all a lie: Theranos wasn’t the revolutionary blood-testing miracle it was advertised to be, and Holmes wasn’t a prophet. (And, according to rumor, that characteristic voice is also a fake.)

“The Dropout,” Hulu’s latest contribution to the streaming world’s current glut of limited series about doomed startups and con artists (see also: Netflix’s “ Inventing Anna ,” Showtime’s “ Super Pumped ,” et al.), falls prey to many of this nascent subgenre’s failings. It’s too long and convoluted by half, and sometimes drops a couple of balls when juggling its oversized ensemble cast. But one thing that show creator Elizabeth Meriwether (“New Girl”) and director of the first four episodes, Michael Showalter (“ The Eyes of Tammy Faye ”), understand about Holmes’ story is that it’s innately ridiculous that people fell for her schtick in the first place. And when “The Dropout” becomes more interested in Holmes as an antagonist in America’s story than the protagonist of her own, the miniseries shines a little bit brighter. 

Running parallel to other nonfiction accounts of Holmes’ rise and fall ( Alex Gibney ’s revelatory “ The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley ”) but chiefly based on the ABC News podcast of the same name, “The Dropout” starts as an underdog biopic of Holmes ( Amanda Seyfried ) before unfurling into a broader indictment of the circumstances that led to Theranos in the first place. We first see her as a kooky, outcast, overachieving chemical engineering student at Stanford, not yet the low-voiced weirdo of her adulthood but still with a Cheshire-cat smile and absurdly-scheduled life plan. “I’m planning on being sexually active in college,” she matter-of-factly tells her mom, before practicing her sorority-girl “woo”s in the mirror. Flashbacks show her as a gangly grade-schooler, determined to run to the finish line in gym class even though she’s laps behind in last place. She’s the daughter of an Enron executive (Michel Gill), witnessing the fallout of her father’s career due to corporate fraud firsthand. One gets the impression that the lesson she took from that wasn’t not to lie; it was to not get caught. 

Still, inspired by the jeans-and-turtleneck vibes of Steve Jobs and her own impatient lust for greatness, Holmes drops out of Stanford as soon as she imagines a one-of-a-kind idea for a mobile blood-test machine and finds a lover/benefactor ( Naveen Andrews ’ wily, menacing Sunny Balwani) who can bankroll her dream. The problem, of course, is that her idea is literally ahead of its time: the technology isn’t there, as a cadre of benefactors ( Bill Irwin ’s Stanford prof and Theranos board member Channing Robertson) and exhausted Theranos scientists ( Utkarsh Ambudkar , James Hiroyuki Liao) are wont to tell her. Years pass, and no number of tests and modifications will make it work.

But the ever-consuming monster of startup capital demands progress, so Holmes makes it work the only way she can: by bamboozling one high-profile investor after another with her aspirational language and uncanny affect. It’s these stretches in which “The Dropout” offers Seyfried the most room to play as Holmes, and it’s a terrific, transformative performance. The role originally went to Kate McKinnon , whom I fear would play it too overtly comic, too in on the joke. Seyfried, on the other hand, gets the innate absurdity of Holmes as a person but also understands that she’s the hero of her own story. It’s impersonation, to be sure, but the innate performativity of Holmes herself smooths over those bug-eyed tics to make them an organic part of the character. After all, Holmes is a weird woman, who slathered on even weirder affectations to keep the old white businessmen she was hypnotizing off-balance. 

But frustratingly, a lot of “The Dropout” can’t match Seyfried’s hell-for-leather frequency, chiefly due to how much they have to stretch out events to fit the show’s eight-hour runtime. (Seven episodes were provided for review.) The first three episodes teeter dangerously towards apologia for Holmes’ misdeeds, characterizing her as driven by past traumas or lost in the thrall of her pseudo-abusive domestic relationship with Sunny—the same mid-aughts #girlboss posturing that allowed her to pull the wool over the eyes of so many well-meaning investors and pundits. Meriwether and the writers make the critical mistake of trying to answer the question, “Who is Elizabeth Holmes?” when they should really be asking, “ Why Elizabeth Holmes?”

Episode four (“Old White Men”) comes closest to entertaining that latter question, as we skip ahead to a post-recession 2010, when Theranos is courting retail healthcare pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens to host “wellness centers” across the globe. Finally, we escape Holmes’ point of view to follow a gaggle of hapless, late-middle-age Walgreens execs trying to size her up and figure out whether Theranos is the real deal. Alan Ruck ’s Jay Rosan is perplexed by the company, but pays himself on the back for elevating a female CEO; Josh Pais ’ Wade Miquelton is even more dubious, but wary of missing out on a miracle startup because “they’re the only thing making money right now.” Showalter frequently frames them in wide shots huddled in front of buildings or dashing between cars, leaning hard into the innate farce of the whole thing—a creaky economic world terrified by enticed by the promise of the new, even if it all might be smoke. Turns out that, even for American capitalism’s top minds, FOMO is far too enticing to ignore.

“The Dropout” occasionally understands that the real appeal of Elizabeth Holmes’ story isn’t what makes her tick, but how she leveraged America’s love of narrative into a smoke-and-mirrors success story. And at its best, it uses a cavalcade of incredible supporting players to convey that tantalizing conflict between cold, hard facts and the buzzy, fuzzy success story Holmes sold everybody. William H. Macy (in a balding prosthetic so huge it looks like that Nic-Cage-in-"Next" hair meme ) is a standout as patent hound and sputtering Holmes nemesis Richard Fuisz, who takes his pursuit of Holmes all the way through a messy divorce. The same goes for Stephen Fry ’s kind, hapless Ian Gibbons, the principled scientist whose faith in Holmes’ work eventually (and tragically) traps him between nondisclosure agreements and a federal subpoena. Sam Waterston and Michael Ironside both shine as, respectively, US Secretary of State George P. Schultz and initial Theranos VC Don Lucas, both men hoping to launder their legacy by helping a nice, pretty young blonde woman save the world. The cast expands even further as the show blazes through the years and zeroes in on different perspectives, eventually landing on Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou (a sedate Ebon Moss-Bachrach ) as the show reaches the inevitable “ Spotlight ” portion of the proceedings.

But for all the individual highlights “The Dropout” offers, it fails to cohere into a streamlined whole, which is more than a little frustrating. For every scene where the writers grow ever closer to the point—tech startups are an enormous house of cards that the right person can exploit through big promises and, in the case of Holmes, identity politics—there are three that waste time picking at Holmes’ inscrutable outer crust, only to find little underneath the surface. It’s the kind of psychologically-hollow character a superb actress like Seyfried can make a true meal out of, and other game actors can bounce off beautifully. All that’s missing is a little more economy of storytelling, and a consistent angle to take on the whole Theranos fiasco. As is, it feels like a vial of blood spinning in a centrifuge: full of possibility, but a bit dizzying to watch.

Seven episodes screened for review .

Clint Worthington

Clint Worthington is a Chicago-based film/TV critic and podcaster. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of  The Spool , as well as a Senior Staff Writer for  Consequence . He is also a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and Critics Choice Association. You can also find his byline at RogerEbert.com, Vulture, The Companion, FOX Digital, and elsewhere. 

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The dropout, common sense media reviewers.

Well-acted show takes another look at an infamous scandal.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this TV show.

Definitely provides a cautionary example of a pers

As befits a drama focused on an infamous swindle,

Elizabeth's co-workers and fellow Stanford student

A sexual assault is a plot point in at least one e

Characters have sex with rhythmic movements and mo

Language is infrequent: "hell," "damn," "f--k."

One of Holmes' abiding ambitions is to be a billio

Characters drink at parties and gatherings; no one

Parents need to know that The Dropout is based on the true story of fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. She founded a company called Theranos, a California medical technology company that claimed to have invented a new way to test blood, claims that were ultimately revealed to be fraudulent. As viewers might expect,…

Positive Messages

Definitely provides a cautionary example of a person who went too far, too fast, despite wishing to make a positive impact on the world.

Positive Role Models

As befits a drama focused on an infamous swindle, main characters are all complex, with good aspects (e.g., Elizabeth is smart, works extremely hard) as well as bad ones (she commits serious financial and moral misdeeds believing that her ends will justify the means). Professor Gardner emerges as a no-nonsense, brilliant professor who was never afraid to puncture Elizabeth's grand plans. Ultimately, Holmes was brought down by whistleblowers in her company with much to lose.

Diverse Representations

Elizabeth's co-workers and fellow Stanford students are a diverse lot, with many Asian and South Asian students and tech workers. Sunny Balwani, a man from Pakistan, is the show's second lead; we understand how his background and Holmes' privileged upbringing contribute to the choices both make.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

A sexual assault is a plot point in at least one episode; we don't see an assault happen on-screen but do see Holmes walking in a confused way down a hallway at a party with mussed hair. Later, she testifies to a college group about the assault, but we only see her distressed reaction afterward, not the testimony.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Characters have sex with rhythmic movements and moaning; bodies are covered by clothing or a sheet. Balwani and Holmes have a romance; expect scenes of them kissing and going on dates.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

One of Holmes' abiding ambitions is to be a billionaire, a fact she announces frequently. Expect visual and other references to conspicuous consumption: fancy cars and houses, expensive clothing and luxury goods.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink at parties and gatherings; no one acts drunk.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Dropout is based on the true story of fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. She founded a company called Theranos, a California medical technology company that claimed to have invented a new way to test blood, claims that were ultimately revealed to be fraudulent. As viewers might expect, Holmes' misdeeds take center stage here. In this dramatic telling of the story (based in part on its namesake podcast ), she's revealed to be a complex character whose hard work and good intentions are overwhelmed by ambition, and she ultimately defrauds investors of billions. A sexual assault is an important plot point; the drama makes the circumstances of the assault hazy by showing nothing on-screen except Holmes looking dazed at a party. Characters do have sex with rhythmic moans and movements as well as kissing in bed and other places; bodies are covered with clothing and sheets. Holmes does have a romance with Sunny Balwani, who became her business partner. In real life, Holmes accused him of physical and sexual abuse. Balwani is portrayed by Naveen Andrews, an actor of Indian background, one of the many Asian and South Asian actors in this drama. Language is infrequent: "hell," "damn," "f--k." Alcohol appears at parties, but we don't see anyone acting drunk.

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

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What's the Story?

Based on the real-life case of Elizabeth Holmes and her disgraced medical tech company Theranos, THE DROPOUT stars Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, whom we first meet as an aspiring Stanford student with powerful ambition. But when she meets future business partner Sunny Balwani ( Naveen Andrews ) and hatches a far-fetched plan to invent a device that can test blood remotely for certain conditions, Holmes gets caught in circumstances beyond her control and is ultimately brought down and revealed for the fraud she always was.

Is It Any Good?

With both empathy for its main subject and an unsentimental view of the drive that led her to a bad end, this series is a fascinating look at a real-life villain with all-too-human motivations. Viewers likely have watched one of the YouTube clips featuring her holding forth about Theranos in her unsettlingly deep voice, and vaguely know she was involved in some type of financial scandal involving fakery. The Dropout starts with a taped deposition of Seyfried/Holmes testifying about her company's financial misdeeds, but it soon zips back to show us Holmes in her nascent stage as a former school outcast turned unnervingly serious Stanford student. By the end of the first episode, she's formulated her big idea (and heard from Laurie Metcalf's deliciously tart professor Gardner that it'll never work), and she's off to the races, business-wise.

Arriving as it does on a wave of bio-series that take a fresh look at female figures at the center of notorious scandals (see: Pam & Tommy , Inventing Anna ), The Dropout is briskly plotted and paced, thanks to solid writing from a strong bench of writers, including some very notable female ones: The Americans' Hilary Bettis and New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether among them. The cast is full of heavy hitters too; besides Seyfried, Andrews, and Metcalf, watch for William H. Macy , Mary Lynn Rajskub , and Anne Archer , among other luminaries, making a meal out of relatively small roles. It's all pretty wonderful, particularly for anyone who saw the headlines and wondered just what was up with this weird lady and her big fake company, another Ponzi scheme for the ages that worked. For a while.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about true stories. What do you need to know about the real-life story behind The Dropout to watch? Is it enjoyable without knowing about Elizabeth Holmes' story going in? What did this show change about the real story? How successful are these changes in making the story more compelling?

What's interesting about the Elizabeth Holmes story? Why is it worth making a TV series out of this story? How is it relevant to contemporary culture? What does it say about business? About ambition?

How does the show present its characters? Does it seem to like or dislike them? How does it seem to want the audience to feel about Elizabeth Holmes?

• Premiere date : March 3, 2022
• Cast : Amanda Seyfried , Naveen Andrews , Laurie Metcalf , William H. Macy
• Network : Hulu
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : History
• TV rating : TV-MA
• Last updated : March 18, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Pres. Biden Says He Won't Drop Out of the Election During Wisconsin Rally

• Episode aired Jul 5, 2024

Biden delivers a speech at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, addressing concerns about his age and reaffirming his intention to stay in the election race. He lists his accomplishments, jokes ab... Read all Biden delivers a speech at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, addressing concerns about his age and reaffirming his intention to stay in the election race. He lists his accomplishments, jokes about his age, and criticizes Trump. Biden delivers a speech at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, addressing concerns about his age and reaffirming his intention to stay in the election race. He lists his accomplishments, jokes about his age, and criticizes Trump.

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Demon Slayer’s final arc will arrive as a trilogy of movies — and here’s the first look

Infinity Castle will become three theatrical films, Crunchyroll says

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Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba just wrapped its Hashira Training arc but the (Mugen) train isn’t slowing down: on the heels of the finale, Crunchyroll that Demon Slayer ’s next arc, Infinity Castle, will roll out in theaters as an “epic trilogy of films.” In a news release, Crunchyroll notes that “the three-part cinematic movies represents the final arc and culmination of the hugely popular award-winning anime shonen series.”

Based on the manga series by Koyoharu Gotoge, published under Shueisha’s Jump Comics, Demon Slayer currently consists of 23 volumes that have sole upward of 150 million copies, a number that turned it into one of the most popular anime on the planet. For Crunchyroll, nabbing the worldwide distribution rights (excluding a few Asian territories) to three additional Demon Slayer films is a major boon; the 2020 film Mugen Train remains the highest-grossing anime movie of all time, the highest-grossing Japanese film at the global box office of all time, and the second-highest grossing anime film in U.S. box office history (having earned $49.5 million, more than Madame Web made in 2024!). Sony’s recent acquisition of the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain expressly for the purpose of platforming anime films in America makes the trilogy a major milestone in Crunchyroll’s campaign to be a one-stop shop for all things anime in the U.S..

After training with the Hashira in the previous arc, Demon Slayer ’s majin protagonist Tanjiro is off to the Infinity Castle to take on Muzan Kibutsuji, the Demon King. A teaser for the movie trilogy is light on footage from any of the Infinity Train films — it’s light on animation in general — but it gives fans who only know the anime a taste for what’s next.

The untitled first Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle movie is currently undated. All of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is streaming on Crunchyroll.

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What Time Will ‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’ Be on Netflix? How to Watch ‘Beverly Hills Cop 4’

Where to stream:.

• Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
• Eddie Murphy

Nasim Pedrad Is the Funniest Part of ‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’

Eddie murphy might return to stand-up, says paul reiser—as long as no one records him on their phones, stream it or skip it: ‘beverly hills cop: axel f’ on netflix, the mostly enjoyable return of eddie murphy’s beloved character, where was ‘beverly hills cop: axel f’ filmed discover the filming locations for eddie murphy’s new ‘beverly hills cop’ movie.

Get ready to laugh, because Eddie Murphy is back as Detective Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F —aka Beverly Hills Cop 4 —on Netflix this week.

Coming to the streamer just in time for the 4th of July holiday, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F finds Murphy reprising his role as a rogue cop who refuses to play by the rules. But when the life of his estranged daughter (Taylour Paige) is threatened, Axel gets serious. Father and daughter reunite, and team up with a new partner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and old pals Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) to turn up the heat and uncover a conspiracy.

Also starring Kevin Bacon and Paul Reiser, and directed by Mark Molloy, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is sure to be a nostalgia-filled fun time for everyone who grew up watching Murphy in the original Beverly Hills Cop movie from 1984. You don’t want to miss it, so here’s everything you need to know about how to watch Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F online, including what time Beverly Hills Cop 4 comes out on Netflix.

Where to watch the new Beverly Hills Cop movie:

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F  will begin streaming exclusively on Netflix  on Wednesday, July 3. You’ll need a Netflix subscription to watch the movie, or a login from a friend.

Is  Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F playing in theaters?

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is not playing in theaters—unless you live in New York City and are able to attend a screening of the film at the Netflix-owned Paris Theater in Manhattan. You can find a showing of the movie at the Paris via Fandango . Otherwise, you’ll be able to stream Beverly Hills Cop 4 on Netflix.

Beverly Hills Cop 4 release date:

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F  will begin streaming exclusively on Netflix  on Wednesday, July 3.

What time will Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F be released on Netflix?

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F  will begin streaming on Netflix on Wednesday, July 3 at 12 a.m. Pacific Time, or 3 a.m. Eastern Time, on Wednesday morning. That means if you live on the West Coast, you’ll be able to watch Beverly Hills Cop 4 on Netflix as early as midnight, if you stay up late on Tuesday.

If the clock strikes 12 a.m. PT / 3 a.m. ET on July 3 and you don’t yet see  Beverly Hills Cop 4  on Netflix, try refreshing the page, or logging out and logging back in. Enjoy the ’80s nostalgia!

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