The Dropout

"The Dropout" will be tough to top, or even match, because of the way Seyfried, along with Meriwether and her writers, marry the visible facets of Holmes' put-on with her skewed ethical paradigm. ... ["The Dropout" makes] a person appreciate the scope of crime – and, better still, the extraordinary pleasure of watching Seyfried and the rest of the actors recreate this case with genuine confidence.

The discovery that Elizabeth might not be the most interesting or important person on screen at all times is what makes The Dropout so watchable and so often startlingly moving.

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.

The Dropout slowly draws you in, because the stakes are so much higher and Holmes’s rise is enthralling.

We’re going to stick with The Dropout because of Seyfried’s pitch-perfect performance as Holmes as well as the myriad guest actor performances that are already looking promising by the end of the first episode. We just hope that the show doesn’t continue to make Holmes the hero of her own story.

Amanda Seyfried gamely does her best, and at times she succeeds in capturing Holmes’ mannerisms and deranged energy.

The show’s more serious elements hit their targets far more often than its attempts at humor. So why bother with the comedy? Perhaps to make the real story less depressing.

I finally caught up with the final two episodes I was missing, and I gotta say that while I found this show quite competent, it also has a lot of weaknesses that undermine a lot of what it accomplishes. Anchored by an excellent performance from Amanda Seyfried, The Dropout succeeds in getting by more often than not, but it also can't help but look and feel like a cliche story that starts with a little lie and so on and so forth, but in frauds most of the time that's how it is, especially when dealing with greed and people like Elizabeth Holmes, so there's no groundbreaking twist to it. I don't dismiss it at all, mostly because of the work of its more than solid cast, but I do think it was a project that was overextended. If you don't want the long fictionalised version, I would recommend the HBO documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.

This is being written after watching 4 of the 8 episodes - and after watching the Alex Gibney documentary, it's always a bit harder to watch a dramatization with actors playing the roles of the people who were flesh and blood only a few minutes before. That said, I found the first 3 episodes compelling and I was especially pleased that Amanda Seyfried, who I've never much taken to in her past work, here lands with a weight she hasn't brought to previous work. However, the 4th episode struck me as an abrupt and unhappy shift in tone - "Old White Men" played the older guys from Walgreen's like idiots, and although the Walgreen team demonstrated a level of naïveté and were taken in by whatever charm Ms. Holmes was said to possess - whether in the doc or this dramatization, I find her transparently phony, affected and without a shred of the magnetism she is reported to have had in such abundance that she could charm millions and millions from the wealthiest, and medically uneducated people one can imagine. The writing presumes that the audience is as stupid as the characters themselves. The Alan Ruck character is particularly moronic and, sad to day, deserves everything that he will live to regret by the story's end. If the final scene is based on something real - wherein the Walgreen guys sing a song to Holmes as they celebrate their ill-fated partnership, well, that's fodder what came before. If the song is a fiction, and I don't imagine I'll ever know which is the case, best to have left it with the rest of the detritus in the lab.