NAB
Hulu / Star’s eight episode The Dropout, Disney’s
adaptation of the ABC podcast series of the same name is the latest in a string
of stories about tech, startups and wealth gone wrong.
article here
The Dropout stars Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth
Holmes, founder of the fraudulent blood-testing startup Theranos. Holmes is
currently awaiting sentencing after being found guilty of committing fraud.
It is a riches to riches rise to becoming one of the world’s
youngest billionaires and the delight in watching her fall that is the
fascination for audiences.
Dropout can be bracketed with Apple TV+’s upcoming WeCrashed
series, based on the podcast WeCrashed: The Rise and Fall of WeWork and
Showtime’s recent Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, starring Joseph
Gordon-Levitt and Uma Thurman. Netflix and Hulu both released Fyre Fest
documentaries about the ‘fake it and they will come’ influencer-hyped
music non-event and Netflix’ Inventing Anna, a true story about a young
female scam artist.
Netflix viewers spent 196 million hours according to Deadline watching Inventing Anna
between February 14 and 20, making it Netflix’s most-watched English-language
series over a one-week period.
“These online streamers keep churning out this content
because they know we will watch,” says TechCrunch. “We’re desperate and eager to understand how people can be so corrupted by the
promise of money and fame that they will sacrifice their morality.”
Commentators including Nancy Jo Sales in The Guardian explain the vogue saying “social media has turned us all into scammers, as well
as victims of the constant scam being perpetrated on us by tech companies. They
promise they will connect us to the world – but their core profit-making plan
is actually the tracking and selling of our data. Essentially, we live in the
age of the scam.”
The Dropout is not even the first longform
examination of Theranos. It’s already been the subject of a major
podcast, a book, an Alex Gibney documentary and a
feature starring Jennifer Lawrence directed by Adam McKay called Bad Blood
is coming soon to AppleTV+.
When Searchlight Television first approached showrunner
Elizabeth Meriwether to work on the project, she was a little skeptical. “I was
just like, ‘What is the point of doing a limited series?’” she told The Daily
Beast https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-dropout-creator-breaks-down-the-humanity-and-inhumanity-of-elizabeth-holmes
“Why would we tell this story again? What would I bring to it?”
The solution, she decided, would be to “engage with the
story on a more human level.” In Holmes’
biography, the showrunner said, she saw “the story of a young woman in a
position of power really kind of struggling with it and trying to figure out
who she is in the middle of that.”
“That felt like a story that hadn’t been told as much on
television,” she said. “You know, it’s not the kind of glossy girlboss, female
empowerment version of a female CEO.”
Over time, the show’s Elizabeth figures out how to
harness her industry’s tokenization of women to her advantage—a brilliant
encapsulation of the way that women, too (especially white women), can
perpetuate misogyny once they decide it’s to their advantage to do so.
There’s another example of this in recent BBC drama Rules
Of The Game, a thriller series set in a mundane office.
Michael Showalter who directed four episodes of the series,
said. “There is a part of [Holmes] that's worthy… she was a young woman trying to
make a mark in a male-dominated industry, and that that's something to
celebrate. Let's celebrate that she had this vision, but let's also see where
her integrity went off-road. Let's see if, as a culture, we can all say that
integrity should have a role and a place in the way we do business and the way
we treat each other as individuals.”
The ‘romance’ between Holmes and Sunny Balwani, the
executive 18 years her senior was among the most creatively dramatized because
the couple kept their private affairs so well hidden. Holmes would later allege
in court that he routinely abused her over their 12-year relationship.
“There’s so little information about what that relationship
actually was—which, you know, was part of their relationship because they kept
it secret for 12 years,” Meriwether said to The Daily Beast. “It felt like such
a huge part of the story that we knew very little about. We learned more in her
trial, and I think we’re going to learn even more in his trial, which is coming
up. But it’s a really complex, toxic relationship.”
One of the things the show serves to highlight is how much
of an easy ride Theranos got from investors and the press.
“Despite refusing to justify any element of its technology,
it took far too long for regulators and officials to really interrogate what
was going on,” says Engadet.
“I mean, in 2015, Holmes was appointed to the board of fellows at Harvard
Medical School! The scale of the fraud, the scale of the lie, became so
great that most people just felt that they had to believe it.”
The Dropout questions like how Holmes got
‘wellness centers’ into a chain the size of Walgreens when her tech didn't
work.
“How does that happen?” asks NPR. “Surely, they had the capacity to determine that she wasn't able to
simply put a machine in front of them, prick a finger, and have it perform
routine bloodwork.”
The question is not why nobody knew; it's why the people who
knew were not able to stop Holmes' ascent sooner.
NPR concludes of the show’s depiction “that more than
anything, she's protected by other people's greed and pride. Once she has
investors who have given her their money, they naturally aren't eager to hear
that the tech is no good, or to have the word spread that the tech is no good. She was deceiving people because she especially wanted to do something huge that
would make her the Steve Jobs of health care.”
A lot has changed about our attitude toward tech in the
times since movies like The Social Network (2010) and Steve Jobs
(2015) were released. The former, painted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a
“tragic hero”, wrote one reviewer.
“Now we look at these stories of startup founders with
rightful skepticism,” says Techcrunch, “which makes sense in an era when
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen appears on prime-time television, telling
us that Facebook prioritizes
profits over public good.”
Reviewers reserve particular praise for Stephen Fry’s
performance as Dr Ian Gibbons, the chemist who worked with Holmes at the start
of her career and died by suicide during a patent dispute.
Here’s Engadget: “Fry, towering over the rest of the cast
and looking every inch the crusty academic in a world of waxen silicon valley
models, acts as the warm and inviting voice of conscience when things start to
hit the slide.”
No comments:
Post a Comment