Advance reviews have just arrived for the Hulu biopic series The Dropout and critics are praising Amanda Seyfried's performance as Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes was the first self-made female billionaire off the back of her company Theranos, which purported to be using a revolutionary technology for blood sample testing. It eventually came to light that she was committing massive fraud and she is currently set to be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison this September. Her story has been the subject of much furor and has been covered by the 2018 nonfiction book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, the 2019 HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and the 2019 ABC Audio podcast The Dropout.
That audio series has now been adapted into a TV miniseries by Hulu starring Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes. It follows her from age 17 to 34 and tracks the development of the massive story with a supporting cast including Naveen Andrews, Sam Waterston, William H. Macy, Laurie Metcalf, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Stephen Fry, Michael Ironside, Dylan Minnette, and Alan Ruck. The series was originally developed with Kate McKinnon in the lead, but she dropped out in favor of Seyfried and is now playing Tiger King figure Carole Baskin in the Peacock series Joe vs. Carole, which drops on March 3, 2022, the same day as The Dropout.
Today, many different outlets have released their early reviews for The Dropout ahead of its streaming premiere. While some have harsher words to say about Seyfried's performance (EW calls her "vaguely Vulcan"), most agree that she delivers as the offbeat personality she's portraying. Likewise, while outlets differ on whether the series needed to be seven episodes long, the individual episodes are praised for their restraint in not allowing unchecked streaming measures to bloat their run times. Check out some selected quotes from critics below:
Thelma Adams, The Wrap
As a character, Holmes comes in and out of focus over the course of the drama, which loses its urgency in its midsection. It lacks the cliffhangers that hook a binger to continue with the next episode, and the next.
Daniel Fienberg, THR
Structurally, Holmes is always at the center of The Dropout, but there is a shift as episodes progress (critics have been sent seven of the series’ eight hours); the crusaders for truth, or in some cases revenge, get individual episodes in which they play hero as well. It’s all a strategy to impressively service this absurdly good cast.
Caroline Framke, Variety
Seyfried has quietly built an impressive resume full of eager ingenues, charismatic seducers, rebellious teens, and young women simmering on the edge of total righteous fury. In The Dropout, she gets to embody all these types and then some, infusing Elizabeth with a manic drive and desperation to win that makes her every scene viscerally effective. Her performance makes it easy to see how the girl who dances around her childhood bedroom while locking eyes with her Steve Jobs poster becomes the woman who fleeces millions from the world’s most powerful men by selling them her vision with a zeal one can only describe as religious in its intensity.
Darren Franich, EW
Seyfried's vaguely Vulcan performance prints the legend of Holmes' torpedo intensity, without quite embodying any of these dramatic possibilities. I worry the show underrates the simple possibility that it's fun to get rich and powerful very quickly by telling lies.
Steve Greene, IndieWire
In the absence of The Dropout having much to add to the existing perception of Holmes, it’s up to Seyfried to do some a lot of the heavy lifting. In doing so, she wisely navigates that middle ground between Holmes’ initial public branding as the premier 2010s girlboss and the competing perception of her as a spoiled sociopath who refused to accept any version of “no.” The biggest decision that The Dropout makes is to paint Holmes as someone more prone to self-delusion than maliciousness.
Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone
It’s a maddening, gripping, and at times startlingly funny recreation of a story that would feel too absurd to be true if we didn’t already know otherwise.
Brian Taylor, Collider
Seyfried does good work mimicking Holmes’ notably odd mannerisms, including an artificially deep voice that Holmes concocted to give herself a more authoritative presence. But showrunner Elizabeth Merriweather, who created one of the last decade’s better hang-out sitcoms in New Girl, and her team, which also includes director Michael Showalter (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), perhaps wisely don’t attempt to turn Holmes into a sympathetic figure.
Although he splits directing duties with Francesca Gregorini and Erica Watson, about half the series was directed by Michael Showalter, who is primarily known for comedy. However, he has previously brought a true story to life in The Big Sick, which is based on the real romance between co-writers Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani (who also star in the film). According to critics, the team here seems to have found a way to balance tones in this decidedly non-comic true story with distinct aplomb.
Although this early praise spells good things for The Dropout, it will still have a bit of a struggle to be heard above the noise. True crime series are at an all-time rise at the moment, as evidenced by Joe vs Carole's inconveniently aligned release date. Projects about scammers are doing big business for streamers at the moment, however, especially Netflix's Inventing Anna and The Tinder Swindler, so this may be in The Dropout's favor.
Source: Various (see above)