​Directed by Michael Showalter
Written by Elizabeth Meriwether, Matt Lusky, and Hilary Bettis
Starring Amanda Seyfried, Naveen Andrews, and William H. Macy
New episodes airing Thursdays on Hulu

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

It's the voice. Elizabeth Holmes has proven to be a constant liar (pathological or compulsive, isn't my place to guess, but come on, it's definitely one of them). But Silicon Valley is full of people who proudly faked it until they made it - who will proudly announce they initially sold VCs on a vague but inspiring lie and then hoped everything would work out. Steve Jobs got called a genius for it. Holmes is also far from the only would-be Jobs who thoughtlessly caused widespread harm. Though it's easier to assess the fraudulence of a physical blood test than it is to measure the number of careers swept away in Facebook's lies about video metrics. The false medical results will always sound more shocking than Sheryl Sandberg feeding/creating a false narrative that her critic George Soros was paying protestors.

My point is that Elizabeth Holmes is a liar among liars, and would be no more spectacular than any of the other egomaniac start-up founders she brushed shoulders with in the Bay Area if she didn't give us something as bizarre and memeable as that fake voice to hold onto. Ethically and morally, she's a trainwreck of a human being. She just did an exceptionally good job being a very weird trainwreck, taking her place at the pantheon the second she decided to drop her speaking voice down a few octaves and talk to other people like a Little Rascal trying to buy tickets to an R-rated movie.

Hulu's new show The Dropout, based on Rebecca Jarvis' ABC News podcast of the same name, is Holmes' Social Network or Wolf of Wall Street. She's played by Amanda Seyfried in the always underrated actor's first big project since landing an Oscar nomination in 2021 for her role in Mank, while Holmes' asshole older boyfriend Sunny Balwani is played by Naveen Andrews, still best known as Lost's Sayid. For its first three episodes, at least, The Dropout is a study in how these two self-professed misfits take a good idea (a machine that can diagnose dozens of illnesses with one drop of blood) and, after failing to get it into a fully functioning state, cloister off and gaslight Holmes' employees and investors.

The series begins in 2017, after Holmes' company, Theranos, has fallen apart. Seyfried plays Holmes all scrunched up, every muscle in her face tense. The effect is similar to watching a minimally-animated cartoon - her eyes move, but the rest of her finds one position that works, and locks into it. In the next scene, we've gone back another few years and Holmes is being interviewed about being the world's youngest self-made billionaire. She tells a reporter that she only eats "green juice," and likes to take meals in her office. She has no personality. You can project whatever you want onto her.

For much of the first episode, Seyfried plays a high schooler, something she also did 18 years ago in Mean Girls, but she does it well enough here that you don't really notice. There's an incredible intensity to her performance as she dances in front of an iMac-era Steve Jobs poster in her bedroom. Jobs, whose black turtleneck costume Holmes would go on to swipe, isn't a romantic ideal the way "poster on a teen's wall" figures so often are in movies. He's proof that you can get people to worship your ideas. She wishes she could climb into his skin. If Holmes had even wanted to meet Jobs, it wouldn't have been to befriend him or talk shop, but for the status boost she could receive by being in his proximity. 

Seyfried's Holmes meets Andrews' Balwani, the only other person taking the language requirement seriously at an immersion program in Beijing. He's in his thirties or forties, she's 19, and he immediately acknowledges how much older he is. He's sold a tech company, become a millionaire and now he's among students, trying to learn Mandarin and hitting on teenagers. The Sparklehorse song "Gold Day" plays over a montage of the two outsiders exploring Beijing. It's a beautiful piece of music that is, notably, written to a baby, from the perspective of its parent.

Holmes returns to America, attends Stanford, rises up to take grad-level courses as a freshman, and leaves the school with a rolodex of teachers who can become business advisors. Holmes is a smart person unwilling to admit she isn't the smartest person alive. She's frustrated she can't will her ideas into reality, that anybody would ask to show her work and that the work would have to be accurate. She practices small talk in the mirror, changing the inflection on the "woo hoos" in "I'm having so much fun! Woo hoo!"

Again, the obvious comparison is to The Social Network, which also focused on a young sociopath's abbreviated college experience and eventual misadventures in front of a judge. That movie came out in 2010 and its story ended a few years before that. Facebook was a giant, and David Fincher knew it was bad news, but every scandal that's come and gone since then has made it more clear how malignant a force it truly is. The retroactive horror of The Social Network is that the film's Facebook hasn't shown its true face. Fincher's Facebook hasn't perfected the outrage cycle that keeps you miserable and clicking. The Cambridge Analytica debacle is years away and nobody's family members have become convinced of the QAnon conspiracy. In 2010, the film was Zuckerberg's origin story. In 2022, it's the origin story of our current reality.

Theranos, however, is over. It can't make your life worse if it didn't already manage to do so a few years ago. The Dropout is as much about the fall, as it is the rise. The story can't get a darker coda in a second season. When the first Theranos box, nicknamed Edison, glitches out and takes Theranos' East Palo Alto office's power with it, we're watching a failure that precipitates more failure and not the goofy first draft of a product that will one day work as intended.

That office is a dump, incidentally. Its windows won't open, it's infested with ants, a stray bullet takes out of one Holmes' car windows. I can't feel bad for anybody here, though. After college, I did a lot of volunteering at a Boys and Girls Club in Menlo Park, about a mile from Facebook HQ, and went over to the East Palo Alto Boys and Girls Club a few times when needed. Some of the richest companies in the country are based in poor areas. I'd be surprised if half the families who used the Boys and Girls Club can still afford to live in East Palo Alto. Every tech company has opened offices in the city and Zillow says the average house costs $1,029,369. A New York Times article from 2004, when the East Palo Alto portion of the show takes place, says the average cost was an already-high $469,000. Theranos failed, but gentrification succeeded perfectly.

By Theranos' East Palo Alto years, Holmes and Balwani are together. It's a secret to Holmes' coworkers, but they cohabitate and rely on each other's emotional support. Balwani has a katana, which is an excellent character shorthand. He's a sword guy, and you can give a sword guy a hundred million dollars and he'll still be a sword guy. Enter Larry Ellison.

The founder of Oracle is, not coincidentally, a college dropout. He's built a reputation as a fighter and a hardass, and he loves Holmes' spirit. There's a performative aspect to dropping out of school that the show hasn't dealt with, though I hope it will. The list of billionaire dropouts in tech is long - some of it happened because companies took off early, but some of it happened when the ex-students were a couple credits short of graduating. In a field that rewards self-mythologizing, dropping out of college can mean 1) that you're like your heroes and 2) that you didn't need anybody's help in deciding what to do and how to do it. As much as it's about saving time and money, for a certain type of person, it's about being able to tell an interviewer that you dropped out. When Holmes fakes a demo with her faulty Edison machine at the end of the episode, it's with that same sense of overconfidence. "I'm allowed to do this," she seems to think, "because I know I'll eventually be right, and you don't get to be the person to tell me otherwise." You can't reject her, she's already rejected you. She doesn't need anybody's input.

The excitement of the new tech boom in Silicon Valley is palpable. The show's timeline is a little compressed (the Prius hit big years before everybody was on Facebook, which happened years before the iPhone's release), but the rush of watching a bunch of people grow their start-ups into Apple and Toyota-level international juggernauts is real. You understand the urge to try to replicate the success your neighbor just experienced, and you get why venture capitalists were throwing more money around than they ever had before.

If the show has a major problem in its first three episodes, it's that Seyfried's Holmes and Andrews' Balwani are dramatically more interesting than the people around them. Balwani is a caustic prick, taking his frustrations with Holmes out on everybody he can. Andrews is terrific at being likable and then shifting into dick mode without it feeling too sudden. The anger is always beneath the surface, the feelings of inadequacy and insecurity that would fester inside a thirtysomething, who hit on a 19 year old, are there even in his happiest moments. He'd be a Todd Solondz character, if he was less attractive. It's unfortunate that the TV-version of Balwani ends up lashing out almost exclusively at would-be whistleblowers whose earnestness is their only definable trait. Holmes, on the show and in real life, is a cipher, but the affectations she develops are bonkers. The supporting characters are ciphers without the same benefit. The best of them, so far, is William H. Macy's Richard Fuisz, a Holmes family frenemy and patent troll who looks like Ted Turner's future ghost and bosses around his much younger wife (hilariously played by Mary Lynn Rajskub). He's the smarmy face of male energy in a show about a woman trying to present as extremely masculine and I want him to get his own spin-off.

It's interesting how much the story makes of Holmes' status as a woman in the mostly-male tech world. A professor explains the cold reality of that life and Holmes' mother comforts her and provides a road forward after a sexual assault. Middle-aged people tell 19-year-old Elizabeth what it's like to be an adult woman and the voice is, in many ways, her big attempt to escape all of that. If she dresses like Steve Jobs and talks like Lurch, she won't be like the other girls and you'll have to take her seriously. The voice and persona are a reaction to Silicon Valley sexism, but they're clownish. They're a flak jacket made of Silly Putty and balloon animals.

In The Dropout's third episode, we see the origins of the voice, and it will be fascinating to see how it's received by viewers. The reaction may serve as a litmus test for people's feelings toward the entire series. Holmes replays a talk with a subordinate alone, in front of a mirror. She tries the doofus voice on. When she answers a call from investor Don Lucas (Michael Ironside, as far removed from his domineering Verhoeven days as Macy is from his sniveling Coen ones), she holds the voice for a moment, seeing if it'll stick. Lucas asks if she has a cold. It's a hilarious moment and the show knows it. But it's also, to Holmes, deadly serious. She's analytical and morally empty and she can't get enough distance from herself to realize she's acting like a MadTV character.

If people don't like the voice reveal, they'd be better served by Alex Gibney's excellent documentary The Inventor. And I wouldn't blame them, though I liked the moment. Seyfried is doing exactly what she has to do, which means she's acting like an idiot. You can do a very good job acting the way a five-year-old thinks a big, serious adult would act and it's going to come off funny and cringey and ugly because that's exactly what it is. I don't think the show has done a good enough job contextualizing Seyfried's performance. As excellent as she is, the rest of the show feels like it's dramatizing pretty standard office politics. I don't think we've been given the necessary look at why all these generic employees would believe so deeply in Elizabeth Holmes. We need the context for how this weirdo could tell clear lies in a fake voice and get a loyal group of investors behind her.

And if we want to dig into that here, we can say that these people are not so smart. That Theranos investor Henry Kissinger is a war criminal who doesn't understand pharmaceutical tech. That Larry Ellison is as lucky as he is smart. That venture capitalists can make a fortune investing in winners, and then keep all their failures quiet. So that you think these people only make good decisions, and are brilliant enough to have eliminated chance from the equation. Steve Jobs never bathed and thought fruit juice would cure his cancer. Larry Ellison splits his time between a replica of a small Japanese village he had built in the Bay Area and the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he owns. These are cartoons. The real world that The Dropout reflects is full of bizarre, egotistical eccentrics and the show falters when it spends too much time from the perspective of people who are not. The Dropout is a very good show so far, I just wish the direction and minor characters had the flavor granted the show's focal points. At its best, it's a show about the weirdest weirdo. In its quieter moments, it's a generic story about the kind of person capable of being conned by those weirdos.