Elizabeth Holmes mania: how the buzziest film of the year has resurrected a gut-twisting TV drama

The Theranos fraudster is the subject of Nathan Fielder’s mind-bending You Can See Everything documentary. It is now driving audiences to watch Disney/Hulu’s 2022 series, The Dropout – and they’re seeing it in a whole new light

There are surprise smash hits, and then there’s You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s documentary-cum-psychodrama about the disgraced US entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes. It arrived in US cinemas with much buzz: this was, after all, an A24 production, helmed by one of TV’s leading performance-art pranksters. But You Can See Everything has surpassed all expectations to become an undeniable hit, and is now the highest-grossing US documentary in 15 years just two weeks after its release.

Co-directed by Lance Oppenheim, it is a surreal and masterly epic; at a press screening in London, the audience appeared to be alternately spellbound by its comedic elements and repulsed by the sheer grossness of some of its characters. That grossness, it should be mentioned, doesn’t pertain only to Holmes, who was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison (this has since been reduced several times) for defrauding investors, after the collapse of her sham blood-testing startup Theranos). It has also – perhaps unsurprisingly – led audiences towards other media inspired by Holmes’s downfall. Journalist John Carreyrou’s book, Bad Blood, has returned to the bestseller lists; the ABC News podcast The Dropout, hosted by Rebecca Jarvis reported a 900% surge in listeners; while the Disney/Hulu TV series of the same name enjoyed a 700% bump in viewers, and is now ranked #47 on IMDb’s “Most popular TV shows” list, despite having been released in 2022.

As Holmes mania abounds, I decide to fire up the podcast, a show I listened to when it was released in 2019. Unlike You Can See Everything – which explores whether Holmes can convince us of her innocence, as much as whether she is innocent – The Dropout podcast takes us back to her halcyon days, when she was named America’s youngest self-made billionaire. This was a time when her Steve Jobs-esque black turtlenecks, apparently bogus baritone voice and talent for wooing super-rich investors was a large part of the story (the first episode is titled Myth-Making).

But it wasn’t just about Holmes the person – it was about what her company did (or rather, didn’t do) and offered a stark reminder that the claims that she made never matched reality. In one episode, we hear Holmes declare that it is possible to run “any lab test from a drop of blood from a finger”, juxtaposed with a clip from a deposition hearing where she is asked just how many tests her machine was capable of carrying out: “I-I-I don’t know exactly what the number was … I think there were probably tens of tests …” (If this sounds like a straightforward lie, Holmes offers her own explanation of her claims in You Can See Everything.)

The TV adaptation of The Dropout recycles the story that the podcast so thoroughly investigated, albeit with a little more artistic licence (Holmes dances like a robot to Lil Wayne, and there’s an entire plot point that’s reverse-engineered to incorporate the Katy Perry song Firework). It’s entertaining, sure: I find myself strangely captivated by the stilted professional relationship/romance between Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) and Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), 19 years her senior, who are obsessed with one another but suggest a cold indifference, too (see also: a real-life text exchange between Holmes and Balwani, where she wrote: “You are the breeze in the desert for me. My water. And ocean. Meant to be only together tiger,” to which Balwani replied: “OK”).

But for the first few episodes at least, The Dropout is mostly like watching a campus drama that occasionally morphs into an episode of Law and Order. Seyfried is great – all bulging, marble-like eyes, unsettling jaw placement and off-kilter speech patterns – but there is a sense that this is an almost meme-esque endeavour, gleefully ripped from the headlines (You Can See Everything does, in its own way, ask whether that might have indeed been the case). At the end of episode one, Elizabeth stares at her finger, and – deus ex machina – the idea for Theranos arrives.

But The Dropout series, like the podcast before it, was built on inescapable facts and what the Guardian described at the time of release as the “gut-twisting mental gymnastics” of it all – the technological inadequacies of Theranos’s equipment; the surveillance culture that meant employees felt they couldn’t speak out; the third-party machines the company used in place of its own hardware; false positives for HIV, cancer and other serious conditions. It might sound facile, but it’s a reminder of the sheer weight of what Holmes’s company did, and of her ability to fight off the most legitimate of concerns. It touches, too, on the suicide of Ian Gibbons, the company’s former chief scientist, who took his own life before he was due to testify against the company. It would be irresponsible to lay the blame for this death solely on Theranos. But it’s clear, amid the jacked-up comedy, that there was plenty of pain for its writers to mine.

Holmes’s story first gripped the world during what was a big moment for scammers, from the phoney heiress Anna Delvey to Fyre festival, with its schadenfreude-inducing story of influencers stranded in the Bahamas under disaster relief blankets. In the years since, the conversation around such grifts has become less cut and dried: Delvey has gone full-on media caricature, while – conversely – many Fyre attenders were revealed to have been normies who got their tickets on Groupon.

Aptly, perhaps, for a moment that was so focused on untruths, the narrative of the “golden age of the grift” is now being rewritten again, in real time. Fielder and Oppenheim have done something daring and brilliant with You Can See Everything, incorporating a new era of technofascism and AI in the process, and meeting Holmes not as a Silicon Valley sweetheart but as a mother and soon-to-be-convict. But the facts – be it on TV or on a podcast – remain as unsettling as ever. “The world believes a reality about me that isn’t true,” says Holmes in the film. And yet so much of it is hard to ignore.