I Watched The Dropout!

Hollywood is too quick to turn an outrage into entertainment. The second we learn of a bureaucratic collapse, a crime, a grotesque secret with terrifying, life-damaging implications, Hollywood races to co-opt our attention and provide a popcorn narrative. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who bluffed her way into billions of dollars and endangered thousands of people with nothing but a crackpot fantasy of medical tech disruption and a lack of scruples, was recently found guilty of fraud but has yet to be sentenced. Still, we’ve already had a documentary about Theranos on HBO, and an 8-episode miniseries on Hulu. Jennifer Lawrence is supposed to make a movie about her with Adam McKay, but it sounds like development has stalled. Maybe because Lawrence just had a kid, maybe because Amanda Seyfried’s performance as Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout is getting rave reviews. The likely Emmy attention for Seyfried might undermine any Oscar attention for Lawrence.

Industry awards. What an embarrassing reason to make a piece of entertainment. Tens of millions spent so your peers can tell you your work was classy enough, notable enough, reputable enough to merit pageantry in its honor. Emmys the big win for television, Oscars for movies. But with the explosion of streaming services (not to mention a pandemic keeping people at home), how do you even tell the mediums apart? Well, if you make a movie available on streaming first, that’s TV. Duh, right? But apparently, if you put that movie in a few select markets with minimal promotion for a week or two, sometimes refusing to even report box office numbers, then it’s cinema. Cinema enough for the Oscars, who gave Best Picture to Coda, a film overwhelmingly seen, if seen at all, on Apple+. While Netflix reported the cinematic gross for Oscar nominee The Power Of The Dog, the budget is more than ten times higher than its six figure theatrical haul. Not because the movie was a flop, but because Netflix never cared if people saw it in movie theaters in the first place. It was only shown in a big room to qualify for the Oscars. Ya boy Scorsese’s complicit in this too, cineastes. He let Netflix spend hundreds of millions financing The Irishman knowing they’d only facilitate it making eight million in theaters. It’s farcical. Nobody in Oscar culture is actionably working to preserve “the cinematic experience,” except maybe tv miniseries queen Nicole Kidman, alone in her seat at an AMC megaplex, alive with anticipation of a superhero origin story. But then she’s getting paid to indulge.

Despite my transparent antipathy and contempt for the prestige biopic industrial complex, I spent about eight hours last week watching Seyfried stomp her way through The Dropout thinking “give! her! the EMMY!” How’d that happen? Well, for one thing, I’m not too invested in the cinematic experience either. It’s now clear to me that - between individual uploading and premiere platforms - streaming provides infinitely more interesting options for artists and consumers than the roadshow. Creative works online can range from 10 seconds to 10 hours, rather than a Lorne-worthy 85 minutes to a trending-debateworthy 3 hours. Plus, there’s this pandemic thing that makes sitting in a crowded room for 85 minutes to 3 hours seem completely asinine. The little pedagogical firebrand in my head with a dubious continental European accent is saying shit like “if you can get millions of people to congregate in 2022, don’t take them to a movie. Take them to the streets.” Sure, it’s more likely I’ll wear a hazmat suit to a 1pm weekday screening of Nope in July than lead a march on city hall, but I’m not the one with capital to burn on publicity.

That ease with burning capital might be a reason The Dropout fails to nail VC culture the way HBO's documentary The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley did. When people ask how investors could hand millions of dollars to a college dropout half their age, particularly one talking like a fairy tale giant in Steve Jobs cosplay, they don’t realize venture capitalists usually have tens if not hundreds of millions to play with. If you have a hundred thousand dollars, losing 95% means you’re fucked. If you have a hundred million dollars, you could lose 95% and still live off the interest from your remaining nest egg. It’s easy to throw caution to the wind at that scale, while everyone who dreams of being that rich will assume the fat cats did due diligence. But venture capitalists weren’t necessarily smart in the first place, just lucky. And they don’t get smarter with time and power. They just get more ensconced from consequence.

Where The Inventor damns the world that facilitated Holmes, The Dropout leans towards takeaways like “bad girlbosses make it hard for good girlbosses.” Maybe that’s because the showrunner is also a woman named Elizabeth who also created a booming, blind-item-causing start-up before she was 30. If you don’t understand why TV is constantly showing us morally dubious imposters we’re told nonetheless to stan, realize that writers’ rooms are rife with fragile narcissists who love to pose for glamorous photo spreads when they’re not treating underlings like dirt or hiding behind their desk to avoid execs who could crush their personal vision in a minute. Documentarians are way more likely to suggest a structural overhaul to a toxic business culture than writers who apparently thrive in it. Which might be why we hear about a new non-profit called Ethics in Entrepreneurship at the end of The Dropout, instead of how fucked up entrepreneurship is.

Thankfully, clear takeaways aren’t really what The Dropout’s aiming for anyway. Over the course of eight episodes, the series does a remarkable job of showing toxic figures on a nightmare arc without letting us feel like we know exactly why Elizabeth Holmes and partner Sunny Balwani made the terrible choices they did. We witness the dehumanization Balwani experiences as an immigrant and hear him describe traumatic experiences with authority, but they still don’t fully explain his rage and resentment towards anyone who questions him. We see intimations of Holmes’ undiagnosed neurodivergence and her own traumatic upbringing, but the show maintains a distance that respects both the ambiguity of her nature and its irrelevance to assessing the damage she caused. There are many reasons someone might mask their disconnect from the world. Whatever those reasons, none of them excuse paying the pain forward.

That nuanced distance extends into the rich supporting cast. Sam Waterston turns George Shultz into a portrait of elderly statesmanship in crisis, struggling to discern who’s disrespecting him and how. One could walk away from the show touched by his struggle to maintain a judicious relationship with power, or one could wish his self-admiring, authoritative ass into the cornfield. Same for Kurtwood Smith and Michaela Watkins’ legal team, either blinded by their love of the hunt or indifferent to suffering they enable. We’re provided with numerous examples of people at widely different levels of power, gradually realizing they’ve been manipulated into a situation too absurd to predict. And thanks to the novelistic nature of a miniseries, we get to see they’d rather be doing the science, at their kids’ birthday party or (spoiler alert) on the road with Dispatch. This kaleidoscope of confused complicity and resistance (Alan Ruck singing along to “Firework” while driving through the snow, yo), allows The Dropout needed, enlightening breaks from its primary duo.

At first I thought Amanda Seyfried might be too beautiful and charismatic to play Elizabeth Holmes (or maybe I just didn’t want to be attracted to Elizabeth Holmes). But with each episode, Seyfried gradually shades and shuts off her endearing goofiness as Holmes leans into the perceived needs of her quest. Similarly, Naveen Andrews fans might struggle seeing this fine human specimen putting his confident glint to work for such an overbearing, vain character. Both actors get to give career performances here, individually provoking the ensemble and finding a difficult, unnerving calm when together alone. I may never see a minute of television this year more transfixing than the “How To Love” sequence. I won’t describe it, and I can’t begrudge if it becomes a meme. Because it’s everything.

Lil Wayne’s decade-old, almost-forgotten-by-me auto-tune ballad is just one of many masterful music drops. The pilot in particular benefits from the music of the early 2000s newly having the weight of 20th anniversary “classic rock,” and not having been mined to death. While the show itself may be questionable in its proximity to the climactic events, the music crackles with the friction of being so recently worthy of reflection. This might be the first time you’ve heard that Yeah Yeah Yeahs song and thought “oh right, that’s the past.” And you might not even be ready to reflect on solo Nick Jonas.

The humor of those drops might be surprising if you didn’t know the creator of The New Girl ran the room and that Michael freakin’ Showalter directed the first four episodes. After years of fantastic short-form comedy work (The State! The Stella shorts!) and awkwardly schmaltzy movies (The Baxter…The Big Sick…), he’s really come into his own on streaming TV, co-creating Search Party and directing the first batch of The Shrink Next Door. There’s a truly audacious sequence outside an Apple Store that is basically edited like a Stella short, Seyfried ratcheting her hysteria up a notch with every cutaway. Compared to a movie, the pace of “prestige” television allows for a tonal fluidity that someone like Showalter, clearly ambitious but schooled in slapstick, can really thrive in.

It’s the pedigree of the cast and crew that led me to check out The Dropout, and I was more than rewarded for my capitulation to the cultural obscenity of streaming sites funding all-star indulgences in glorifying toxic figures involved in all-too-recent catastrophe. They made a lively, comic and complicated show about how we do and don’t understand the pathology behind fraudulent manipulators, and what is required from us when we find ourselves entangled in their web. I don’t know if it’s worth it to have all these headline-milking shows at our disposal, but a show like The Dropout is worth something all the same.