Working through the Guardian's Best of 2022 list and one show on there, perhaps surprisingly lowly placed, given the Golden Globe winning turn from its star, was "The Dropout". This limited series, released on Disney Plus in the UK, was one of a number of recreations of relatively recent historical events that seem to have come after the success of "The Big Short" and "The Social Network".

Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) drops out of Stanford and invests her tuition fees in her start-up company Theranos, a biomedical firm based around her idea of using a single drop of blood to test for multiple conditions. The company raises millions and millions of dollars in investment capital, and Holmes herself is lauded as a success story. However, the device doesn't work properly and never has and not only are they defrauding business partners, but they are providing incorrect medical information to real people.

I, generally, have two main complaints when it comes to this sort of show. The first is that the story is padded out to meet a studio mandated runtime, so there often are episodes of worthless backstory to get through. The second is that the shows do a really poor job of properly explaining the timeline of the events. I don't think that "The Dropout" falls into either of those two pitfalls. The plot made sense, I never had questions as to why things happened, despite the incredulity of it in retrospect or why people kept coming on board and taking the risk on Theranos. It was a self-fulfilling hype machine that nobody particularly wanted to come off the rails.

Amanda Seyfried does amazing work here. Her Elizabeth Holmes isn't really a person at all, by which I mean that Elizabeth reinvents herself as a new persona to avoid dealing with previous trauma and the guilt of the crimes that she is continuing to commit. You can see the veil slip though whenever she has to interact with someone on a human level. It's very much an all star cast though, with Sam Waterston, Alan Ruck, Naveen Andrews and William H Macy standouts, though everyone is great.

Might never have gotten around to it, were it not for the Guardian's list, but I'm happy that it pointed me towards this, and I'd certainly recommend it.