Dropout (Hulu) Review: How a Fascinating Overachiever Gets Divorced from Reality

The limited series docudrama covers the true story of Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes who invented a way to diagnose multiple diseases through blood or something like that, and then cut corner after corner to the point where she went from wide-eyed dreamer to over-stressed manager to someone who could unequivocally be classified as the bad guy.

Played by the always-talented Amanda Seyfried, Holmes is portrayed early on as an overachiever with curious asocial tendencies. She comes off as a social pariah when she insists to her fellow students in a Mandarin immersion program that they speak Chinese like an unpaid dorm RA. The message is clear: Friends are secondary to her goals. She even practices a form of code switching by deepening her voice with male funders. It’s hard to put a finger on what or who Elizabeth Holmes is but she’s a fascinating enough figure (even for someone like myself who had no knowledge of her real-life counterpart) to try to pick apart.

More so, as a plucky underdog with few social friends and a woman with diminutive stature in a man’s world she initially makes for a good underdog as she genuinely wins the respect of accomplished scientists decades her senior (at least at first).