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. Continue reading...
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