This is an inspiring step forward

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2022.  

#47 : The Dropout

This real-life tale about the Silicon Valley fraudster Elizabeth Holmes – who was the youngest self-made female billionaire in the US, until the rumours started – was anchored by such a remarkable lead performance by Amanda Seyfried that it made Jennifer Lawrence drop out of playing the founder of Theranos in a planned film. As she told the New York Times, “we don’t need to redo that. She did it.”


I've heard this is good so am looking forward to watching it - I'm aware of the story so I already know it ends badly, so I'm intrigued as to how much suspense there's going to be.

Hmmm - well there's some suspense, but not in the way that I was looking for, if I'm being honest.  I stuck with it for three episodes and by that point things were already going very, very wrong for Elizabeth so I found the whole thing really rather stressful - the suspense was more "why did no-one call this out waaay earlier?" than "how is she going to convince people things are OK?".  It was all well filmed (they really LOVED their retro touches!), an interesting story and there were some decent performances in it, but ultimately I didn't care enough to stick with it.

And when I say some decent performances, Amanda Seyfried really does do an excellent job with someone who is a very strange character indeed - and you do find yourself feeling remarkably sympathetic at times (whilst at the same time realising she's probably a really horrible person in real life).  Someone who doesn't elicit any sympathy is Sunny Balwami played by Naveen Andrews (I knew I recognised him, but had to look it up to remind myself he was Sayid in Lost) - in the episodes I saw he was a nasty piece of work, but definitely a well played nasty piece of work.

The series has a very large cast with some familiar faces in it including (amonst many others) Stephen Fry (playing Stephen Fry, pretty much), William H. Macy, Mary Lynn Rajskub (who will always be most famous as the amusingly annoying Chloe from 24 for me), Laurie Metcalf, Alan Ruck and Anne Archer.

The story is well done - they've obviously done a great deal of research but also done quite a lot of "making stuff up" but it all fits together pretty seamlessly, although it does help that the known facts are pretty unbelievable so whatever they make up is going to fit in pretty well!

And that's pretty much all I have to say really - it's all perfectly watchable if you can handle the stress and don't have anything else to watch, but I've got loads of stuff on the go at the minute and this just didn't have enough to make it stand out from the field for me.  But if you fancy a very "strange but true" tale featuring some fine acting, it's available to watch on Disney+

#46 - Surprisingly enjoyable
#48 - Not for me

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