The Dropout

The Dropout follows Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos through the gap between an impressive promise and a technology that has to work outside a presentation. Amanda Seyfried makes Holmes's self-invention uncomfortable without reducing the performance to an imitation of a voice.

The business setting provides much of the tension. Investors want conviction, employees need answers, and doubt becomes increasingly difficult to express when everyone has already committed themselves to the story. The series is particularly interesting when confidence starts functioning as a substitute for evidence.

This is a dramatisation of the Theranos story, not a documentary transcript of private conversations. Its value as television lies in showing how ambition affects relationships and decisions, including those of people willing to believe they have found an exceptional opportunity. The Playlist offers another technology-business drama with a very different subject.