Hulu’s new series The Dropout is based on the infamous story of scammer Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, a fraudulent blood company that claimed it had the technology to perform rapid blood tests with a singular drop of blood, rather than the traditional tube.
With scammer stories like Tinder Swindler, Inventing Anna, and Bad Vegan seeing great numbers, Hulu has joined the party with its own reproduction of a fraudulent tale: Elizabeth Holmes and the fall of her 9 billion dollar company Theranos. Blood testing has been a big part of our lives for years; for some it can be a traumatizing experience — fear of needles, fear of blood. In part, it was this familiar sense of unease that prompted the start of Theranos, a blood testing company made by college dropout Elizabeth Holmes that lied to the general public and other company directors about its lab testing and lab equipment.
The series stars Mean Girls actress Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth in which she plays the role wonderfully — from her voice and mannerisms to her unique quirks and oddities. This is especially conveyed with the depiction of Holmes’ real-life obsession with Apple founder Steve Jobs, and basically wanting to be the female version of him.
The series also stars Naveen Andrews as Holmes’ COO and former lover. To say there’s chemistry between the cast is an understatement. The series is a must-watch for the way their love story is shown, in itself.
Overall, people on social media have described the series as addicting, and are eager to see what comes next. In my own opinion, the way that Elizabeth was foretold as a little girl with a big dream that grew into a greedy, money-hungry scammer is what’s really so captivating. She’s so easy to dislike and it makes the series so much more interesting.
The show follows the real tale of Holmes as she drops out of Stanford after only 2 semesters of being a biomedical engineering major and becomes the CEO and founder of Theranos. She;d wanted to eliminate the traditional way of drawing blood and reduce it to something simple: a finger prick that would be uploaded to a machine to make the overall process quick, less costly, and easy for less than a fraction of the typical amount of blood.
The problem? The company had been using traditional blood-testing machines rather than the Edison devices that it claimed to be using and these same Edison machines may have been producing inaccurate results.
In little to no time, Holmes had collected over 700 million dollars in investments and even a partnership with Walgreens, back in 2013. Only five years later, the company was charged with fraud and, now, Elizabeth Holmes and COO Sunny Balwani are facing charges up to 30 years or more. For a limited series, it’s done a great job showcasing this scandal and, frankly, I cannot wait to see how it’ll lead into the trials and sentencing. It’s crazy to think how successful this company had been over the course of more than a decade, but I guess that was exactly what made Holmes so talented, in her own way. That being said, new episodes of The Dropout are released every Thursday, on Hulu, so make sure to catch up as the finale draws closer and closer.