TheDropout showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether on seeing herself in the story, updating the series during Elizabeth Holmes’s trial, and why making Holmes dance to Lil Wayne became the easiest way to legally depict her intimacy with Sunny Balwani
Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout. Photo: Beth Dubber/ HULU Before writing a show about an imploding biotech start-up, Elizabeth Meriwether was best known for creating the sitcom New Girl. For reasons she herself doesn’t understand, Fox Searchlight asked her to pitch herself as showrunner for a limited series based on the podcast The Dropout about the rise and spectacular fall of Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent blood-testing start-up Theranos.
Her relationship with her identity always interested me, and it felt like she was a different person with Burning Man and Billy. Every time I looked up where she was now, the pictures made it look like she was so happy. Why would that be? Was it really how she feels? I wanted to end the show at Burning Man, but then COVID happened, and that was not going to be possible. I realized I could do it in a simpler way but keep that same spirit. Now it’s one person getting into an Uber.
It doesn’t say scream in the script. I wanted a moment of reckoning. I struggled because Elizabeth, before the trial, hadn’t talked about it and never said she did something wrong, that she was sorry. I thought about having her not ever come to a place of reckoning, and it felt unsatisfying as a viewer. I knew that if she was going to have a moment of that, it couldn’t be in public.
There’s an exchange in the finale between Elizabeth and her mother that references Elizabeth’s assault and her mother’s advice to her afterward. Elizabeth says, “You told me to put it away and forget it” and “If you choose to forget certain things, do you think that’s lying?” How did you think about writing that moment?
It was also a way of getting the audience back to the particular year of a scene. I think the difference between 2009 and 2015 is interesting, but how do we get the audience there emotionally and quickly? Then there were things between Elizabeth and Sunny that I couldn’t dramatize for legal reasons, and I found that dance and music were a way of telling the story without using words.
That was from Dan LeFranc, who wrote that episode. I told the writers I wanted music to be a big part of the show, and he Googled the top song at the moment in time and then zeroed in on the lyrics and what they meant to Dr. Jay. I think we’re all Dr. Jay in that moment. I read Tina Fey’s memoir right before New Girl started. I mean, look at my glasses. Have I just spent my life trying to be Tina Fey? I lost my voice the first week of New Girl, and the doctor asked me if I had been trying to sound authoritative. I think it’s hardwired in our brains that we need to be more masculine and sound more like men to be taken seriously.
Writers would come in like, “I really understand why she did this,” and others would be like, “But this is the horrible thing that happened because of what she did.” We were always having those conversations. I hope that’s reflected in the show. I don’t want people to walk away from the show with a verdict on her or a diagnosis. Everybody I talked to when I was working on this wanted to label her a sociopath.
It was a constant conversation with our casting director Jeanie Bacharach and Hulu about whether we were going too far into the comedy world with casting. I felt, and I still feel, that really great actors play the moment. Some of the funniest aren’t doing “comedy.” We should try for a joke and see how it feels and then pull back on it if it felt like we were going too far.
That was actually a reshoot. We’d shot something that felt like it wasn’t having as big of an impact emotionally. The original scene was much shorter, and I was glad we expanded it and let her go for it. That scene was one of the last things she shot as the character. Michael Showalter, the director, talked about the fact that her voice wasn’t a joke and was an important emotional part of the character. That scene was the climax of that story. It’s when her self is splitting apart.
For a TV show, The Dropout offers a pretty realistic depiction of the process of reporting a story like this: getting sources together, facing the Theranos lawyers.
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