The Dropout Review: A Startlingly Empathetic Portrait of Deception

The details in The Dropout are strikingly unembellished, but it’s the perspective-shifting storytelling that brims with imagination.

The Dropout
Photo: Beth Dubber/Hulu

In January, days after Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on four charges of defrauding investors in her $10 billion medtech startup Theranos, Rochelle Gibbons sat on a park bench and told CBS just how she felt about the verdict. “Well,” she said, “there’s a little bit of satisfaction in knowing that she’s gonna suffer because, believe me, I’ve suffered.”

Rochelle, played by Kate Burton in The Dropout, is the widow of Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry), a Theranos scientist who invented much of the technology that Holmes spuriously co-patented and whose 2013 suicide is among the company’s most devastating casualties. And while Rochelle’s role is a small one, both in the events of Theranos’s rise and fall and in Hulu’s limited series, The Dropout makes space for stories like hers to resonate: Holmes may have stolen the spotlight, but the series, with spectacular sweep, explores the full web of investors, employees, partners, and patients who bought into her flawed, unflinching vision.

It’s easy, at first, to root for Elizabeth (Amanda Seyfried). She’s a tensely determined Stanford undergraduate who won’t take no for an answer, long before she even has a question to pose. Once she’s identified a mission—to pioneer a blood diagnostic technology that will be able to run hundreds of tests on a single drop of blood from a painless finger stick—Elizabeth swiftly allows that vision to become the entirety of her identity. She lives for Theranos and imagines, and eventually demands, that others will sacrifice for her cause as readily as she will.

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Elizabeth drops out of school and garners millions from the likes of Oracle’s Larry Ellison (Hart Bochner), becoming a superstar CEO on the cover of Forbes. What she isn’t counting on are the choices she faces once she realizes that her technology is years away from working. Her initial white lies bloom into a decade of criminal deception with a denouement that the series prefigures by framing each episode with excerpts from the pre-trial deposition.

Holmes adopted the devil-may-care, fake-it-till-you-make-it ethics of Silicon Valley startups, but Theranos was a healthcare company, one whose technology had real consequences for real patients, a distinction that The Dropout never lets us forget. A visit to a cancer clinic where a patient registers to have her blood regularly tested on a machine that won’t provide accurate results horrifies scientist Edmond Ku (James Hiroyuki Liao), whose crisis of conscience is an early indication of the kinds of critical moments that the series aims to highlight.

But what makes this retelling, adapted from Rebecca Jarvis’s podcast of the same name, so spectacular is how delicately and sparingly it fictionalizes the story. The details are strikingly unembellished, but it’s the perspective-shifting storytelling that brims with imagination. And while the series recreates a great many documented moments, including Elizabeth’s appearances alongside Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, Seyfried surprises most in a series of sequences in front of the mirror as Elizabeth constructs her bizarre public persona, complete with Steve Jobs-inspired black turtleneck, and assumes the deep voice that would define her.

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The Dropout most potently fills in the blanks in the off-the-record relationship of Elizabeth and Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), 19 years her senior, who became her closest, perhaps only, confidant and eventually came on board as Theranos’s despotic COO. Since they hid their romantic relationship from almost everyone, The Dropout has ample room to invent. The real Holmes, in her trial defense, testified that Sunny was emotionally and sexually abusive, ultimately controlling her actions at Theranos. That purported puppet relationship isn’t depicted here; she’s certainly seen calling the shots at the company. But there’s a persistent rippling tension between Elizabeth’s desperate need for Sunny’s constant caustic, often cruel counsel and her discomfort over him seeing through her in a way that no one else does.

In one of the series’s best, creepiest scenes, Sunny dances with Elizabeth while he wears a mask with her face on it. Then she puts on an identical mask too. They’re most at home with each other when they’re pretending to be versions of the Elizabeth they’ve collaborated in creating, openly acknowledging to one another that it’s all a facade.

As Elizabeth’s capacity for empathy dissipates, The Dropout zeroes in on the lives most potently impacted by her deceptions. The series cannily latches on to the characters facing the greatest moral dilemmas at any moment, and who have the greatest potential for change. It would be tempting to focus squarely on Elizabeth, plumbing the imaginative possibilities of her interiority, but The Dropout smartly lets her recede once it’s become clear that her ethical journey has reached the point of no return.

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When Elizabeth fires Dr. Gibbons, who’s portrayed with a tragic joviality by Fry, the camera captures her emotionless face and doesn’t give us entry into what she might be feeling about the confrontation. An entire comic thriller of an episode even focuses on Theranos’s courtship of Walgreens from the perspective of the Walgreens executives (including a very funny Alan Ruck) as they try to suss out Elizabeth’s game plan. We’re as in the dark as they are.

Recalling Shakespeare’s ultimate treatment of villains like Richard III that audiences have been asked to invest in, even cheer for, The Dropout subtly turns on Elizabeth as it identifies its most convincing heroes who enter late in the game: the young whistleblowers Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-young Kim) and Tyler Shultz (Dylan Minnette), the grandson of Reagan’s secretary of state, the Elizabeth-besotted board member George Shultz. Erika and Tyler refuse to stay silent about the daily mismanagement and deception of patients. Somehow the series finds time to convincingly negotiate the tensions between them as Erika exposes the privilege in Tyler’s freedom to speak truth to power because of his wealth and family connections.

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. “People are replaceable,” Elizabeth teaches herself to believe as she fires, freezes out, and foists her lawyers on anyone who stands in her way. The Dropout commandingly proves her wrong.

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Score: 
 Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Naveen Andrews, William H. Macy, Laurie Metcalf, Elizabeth Marvel, Kate Burton, Michael Gill, Stephen Fry, Bill Irwin, Alan Ruck, Dylan Minnette, Sam Waterson, Hart Bochner, James Hiroyuki Liao, Camryn Mi-young Kim  Network: Hulu

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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