The eight-episode miniseries is part of a group of new shows premiered this year that are looking at the US tech industry more closely. In the first episode of Hulu's new miniseries "The Dropout," a young woman studies a 90s poster by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, a mixture of admiration and envy. But this is not the prologue to the story of the greatness of Silicon Valley. The woman is the founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried), and The Dropping is a distorted tale of wild ambition, hypocrisy and retribution. The Hulu series is one of at least three new shows debuting this year that have a decidedly skeptical view of the US tech industry and the tough but struggling founders that seem to be driving it. "The Dropout" joins the drama from the Showtime anthology "Super Pumped", a portrait of macho arrogance and tactical ruthlessness at Uber, and the limited series of Apple TV + "WeCrashed", a story about the rise and fall of the startup office space WeWork. (Super Pumped premiered in late February; WeCrashed debuted on March 18.) The big tech titans look like the new TV antiheroes - small screen villains who catch our attention despite their alleged atrocities, or perhaps because of them. TV producers have recruited famous actors. Super Pumped plays Joseph Gordon-Levitt as former Uber boss Travis Kalanick, who resigned in 2017 amid scandals over workplace culture and privacy issues. WeCrashed features Oscar-winning actors Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as Adam and Rebecca Neumann, the couple at the center of a spectacular technology implosion. The Dropout was created by Elizabeth Merriweather, a writer and producer best known for Zooey Deschanel's sitcom New Girl. Meriwether adapted the Hulu series from the podcast of the same name, hosted by ABC News journalist Rebecca Jarvis, and assembled an ensemble of celebrities anchored by Seyfried as Stanford University dropout. "She is such a mystery" Meriwether saw the television version of eight episodes of The Dropout as a chance to delve deeper into the Teranos and Holmes saga, which was condemned in January for misleading investors into believing that its blood test startup had created a revolutionary medical device. But in many ways, Holmes remains an enigma to Meriwether. "In this particular story, the deeper you dig, the less understanding you have," Merriweather said with a laugh in a recent interview with Zoom. "It's such a mystery - and for me it's still a mystery even after I worked on the show." Meriwether was not the first creator to discover a rich psychological drama in the ascent of Holmes and the catastrophe of Terranos. "Don't Look Up" director Adam McKay will direct Jennifer Lawrence in a film adaptation of "Bad Blood", a bestseller by The Wall Street Journal reporter John Kerryru. The prolific documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney described Holmes' fall from grace in HBO's 2019 Inventor: The Inventor in Silicon Valley. "I tried to think deeply about what was going on emotionally for her, because I felt it was part of a story I could tell as a playwright that reporters couldn't tell. "I can imagine what it would be like to be a fly on the wall," Meriwether said. Michael Shawolter ("Eyes of Tammy Faye"), who directed the first four episodes of "Dropping Out," said he felt equally compelled to "get the audience into the room," creating an intimacy that can be hard to find in court documents or strictly journalistic accounts.
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