The Dropout (2022)

Business scandals come from a variety of industries such as Banking, Automotive, Finance, Real Estate or literally anything imaginable. Sometimes they involve well known companies like Volkswagen or Facebook but occasionally, we get fresh start-ups like Theranos. With every article that I read and every YouTube video that I watched, I was simultaneously shocked by what this company was doing and at the same time, I couldn't help but be impressed by the illusion that was created.

The story revolves around Elizabeth Holmes, an ambitious girl who dropped out of Stanford to open her own company named Theranos. Her goal was to revolutionize the medical industry by developing a new way of testing blood and as you can imagine, it didn't go as planned. Nevertheless, that didn't stop our heroine from achieving her dream of becoming a famous entrepreneur. As with many biographical shows, there needs to be a degree of dramatization and here it is effectively used to add juiciness to the story without dissolving the core message.

My biggest question is why did they cast a nearly 40 year old woman to play a young girl? Admittedly, Amanda Seyfried did look the part and she brought a lot of charisma while giving a good performance. However, her mature look robbed us of the freshness, naivety and inexperience that comes with being a young entrepreneur. On the other hand, Naveen Andrews was excellent as Sunny and the rest of the cast did a fine job too.

In addition to being entertaining, the series presents a simple, yet interesting outlook on the state of modern economy where many invest into things that people don't fully understand. This in turn creates shareholder primacy whereby the company becomes preoccupied with satisfying those shareholders and everything else, including customers, becomes secondary. The fact that Theranos was a medical company makes it all the more tragic and worth watching.

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