A good series about the infamous Elizabeth Holmes. A talented manipulator who managed to create a company Theranos with billions of investments, to produce portable analyzers capable of doing detailed health analysis with only one drop of blood. Having no deep knowledge in science and business, thanks to a combination of circumstances, charisma, probably the ability to "read" people and unrestrained enthusiasm, the girl managed to attract huge money and convince not only investors, but also state structures of her competence and prospects of the company.
It is difficult to say what the real Elizabeth really is, but the series suggests that there is a lack of empathy, superficial knowledge and a complete lack of understanding of what her actions led to in the end. And in the end, people who were misdiagnosed suffered. And, of course, it is foolish to blame only the girl. All these investors and auditors from the state services, of course, had to do normal checks. But driven by greed and short-sightedness, seemingly intelligent people bought into the lies of the girls. Are they to blame? I think so. Were they punished? Of course not. And the culprit herself eventually got 11 years. She'll probably be out sooner. The U.S. legal system is generous for early. In one podcast I saw the story of how the maniac of the convicted for decades was released as a result, after 18 months.
So that's life and nothing else. Amanda Seyfred won a Golden Globe for her lead role as Best Actress of a TV Mini-Series or Film. And even after this series, a phobia may develop that everyone is cheating on you and you can not trust anyone. That's what it is.
What we are willing to do, being confident in our rightness (c)
I learned about the scandalous story of the main character directly from this series, and in my opinion, this allows you to see the project with a less objective view. Who is Elizabeth Holmes, the unacknowledged genius grinded by corporate grindstones? A fraudster obsessed with success? A traumatized child who was just not given the right to be himself and live his life on his own? It seems to me that little by little, at least, this image is formed in the series, which in the life of Miss Holmes will surely tell herself over time, not missing the opportunity to shine a little more in the rays of universal attention.
The most interesting and dramatic line for me was the relationship between Elizabeth and Richard Fuse. How amazingly and filigreely human passions, ordinary emotions, can literally build and destroy huge companies, on which many people, many families, depend in the future. Well, the topic of parental estrangement, expectations and placing the burden of their unlived life on innocent children, unfortunately, many more films will be shot about this.
The cast really liked it, the editor-in-chief of the New York edition just won me over, that’s how important a wise, empathetic leader is, but Amanda Seyfried is definitely having a great time. Brilliantly shown the transition from a sweet, but broken girl-zubrila to a completely broken, with obvious mental abnormalities, cold-blooded con artist, no longer capable of human emotions. I don’t think I’ll ever wear a black turtleneck or red lipstick again, and by the end of the show, it’s disgusting.
I think you can choose Elizabeth as the capital of your future wealth something simpler, not related to medicine, she could live a life of peace and really achieve something, but she set her sights on the most important thing - health, where mistakes are not forgiven even for men. And women, unfortunately, as predicted by the professor from Stanford, she did a disservice.
10 out of 10
Hulu is said to have attempted to replicate the success of Netflix's Inventing Anna with its adaptation of the story of another real-life scammer. And they did it! The mini-series Removed, which was shown by Elizabeth Meriweather, is based on the eponymous podcast by journalist Rebecca Jarvis. It told about the extraordinary fate of Elizabeth Holmes, who at the age of 19 came up with a revolutionary idea for the health care sector - to create a device that allows you to get ten times more information from one drop of blood than with conventional tests using a syringe, and anyone can take a blood test without leaving home. Charisma, charm and high persuasion skills allowed the entrepreneur to found Theranos in just a few years and make it one of the most successful in the United States. In 2015, Forbes USA named Holmes the youngest female billionaire, and the value of her company was estimated at $9 billion. . The main role was brilliantly performed by Amanda Seifred and this is one of the advantages of the series!
I knew about Elizabeth Holmes for a long time and the details of her scam struck me. Videos, documentaries and articles were viewed. It was not clear to me who the man was and how she had so easily deceived the big uncles of political investors.
Finally came the series, which opened for me the image of Elizabeth.
The girl is described at first as a talented handywoman who systematically goes to her goal, but does not know how to communicate with people. Is it necessary? That's what it takes.
To me, Elizabeth Holmes is a typical millennial, undergraduate. She gained superficial knowledge and decided that she knew everything better than others. The very idea that I knew better and better than anyone else captured and at the same time became fatal. Alas, the experience of Steve Jobs played a cruel joke with her. Elizabeth was convinced that education was not necessary at all, experiments, work on mistakes. The goal is to become the richest woman in the United States.
Her idea is brilliant and simple - a drop of blood from a finger to diagnose hundreds of diseases. But this theory breaks down about reality - it is technically impossible and will not be possible for a certain number of years. There are too many factors, too many conditions that any laboratory technician and any doctor knows.
A brilliant and progressive idea turned into a failure, but Elizabeth does not go on, does not try, does not learn, does not try to figure out, she fakes and deceives to prove that she is right, and not this decrepit professor of Stanford.
Elizabeth is a sociopath and does not understand or perceive the feelings of others. It doesn’t care about the people, its employees or the people being tested in its labs.
The result is predictable - bankruptcy and prison.
Amanda Seinfred did a great job. She repeated the image so successfully that it was a little scary from the image of a crazy, greedy woman scammer.
Besides Elizabeth's story, we were told the stories of everyone involved. For some, it was tragic. But it's good that there are still people who were not afraid to go ahead and expose Elizabeth despite the harassment and persecution.
The film vividly demonstrates the classic success and failure that affected Silicon Valley. Women are more likely to be denied funding for startups.
The true story of how the great revolution in the medical sector turned into a great scam
"She Had the World at the Tip of Her Finger"
Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, needed a new hero. Better a heroine. And she was. Elizabeth Holmes, who was later called “Steve Jobs” in a skirt, promised to release a blood analyzer capable of conducting complex studies on a single drop. Investors were so eager to believe in the American dream that they allowed the undergraduate, who had no experience in biotechnology, to become one of the richest American women according to Forbes and get into the list of the most influential people in America Time.
“Money. Romance. Tragedy. Deception. The story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is an incredible tale of ambition and fame gone terribly wrong. How did the world's youngest self-made female billionaire lose it all in the blink of an eye?
Lacking “neither a working prototype nor a clear understanding of how to turn an idea into a reality,” Holmes raised a multi-billion dollar investment in her shell company. Even Bill Clinton and Rupert Murdoch bought it. In 2014, Theranos was valued at $ 9 billion, but in 2015, before the company’s IPO, The Wall Street Journal journalist John Carreiro published a series of exposés, and the Theranos bubble burst.
And then the capitalist machine worked at full power. In 2018, Carreyrou published the book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup John Carreyrou; in 2019, ABC News journalists released the podcast “The Dropout”, which currently includes 28 episodes; in the same 2019, HBO showed the documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” (The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley); in 2022, Hulu presented the series “The Dropout” (The Dropout); in 2023, Adam McKay introduced the eternal version of this story to viewers. Why eternal? Because it's about money.
If you go back to the series, it very clearly conveyed the spirit of the startup. So, full of enthusiasm and altruism in the beginning, the company turns into a calculating, devoid of empathy corporation in the end. The same metamorphosis occurred with its founder. Amanda Seyfred as Elizabeth Holmes is extremely organic - don't be lazy, watch at least the documentary trailer to compare the artistic incarnation with the original. And let us wait for more than one film adaptation, this is incredibly good.
8 out of 10
Suddenly attending streaming synchronized inspiration earlier this year gave viewers three series about high-profile startups and related scandals ("Flame: Battle for Uber", "Faltered" and "Down"), Hulu got the hottest story - the rise and fall on the dock of the founder of Theranos Elizabeth Holmes. Dozens of videos and documentaries have been shot about this grandiose collapse, so it is difficult to expect any revelations, previously unknown details and unexpected plot twists from “The Removed One”, but this is a completely working attempt to artistically comprehend what happened. Sufficiently standard for paintings about project failures, the scheme of “idea-PROFIT-failure” as impossible to place is shaded by constant footage of testimony in court, the collapse as a foreboding. This suspense makes you look especially closely at the results of blood tests on the “revolutionary” Edison machine, listen to Holmes’ pitches to investors and her spirit-lifting speeches to employees, in an attempt to understand what you are seeing: a well-planned scam or a scientific failure that could happen to anyone, a cynical fraudster or a woman with too ambitious dreams. According to some critics, Amanda Seifred appears in the role of her whole life: from purely physical (famous empty eyes and a fake baritone) to behavioral features, the image of Elizabeth Holmes is a real actor’s luck, the material of rare integrity and expressiveness. Such stories are asked for on the screen, this is a ready-made hit - just have time to shoot.
At the same time, “Removed” is a project as much praised as Theranos itself was overhyped. The problem with the series is that its creators have not decided what they are filming: the role of the individual in building the company (as in the case of “It didn’t work”) or the role of the environment that promotes deception, fraud and violation of business ethics (as did “Battle for Uber”). There are enough videos on YouTube about this story that manage to tell and demonstrate more in twenty minutes than the brainchild of Hulu in almost eight hours. Sketches from the private life of Elizabeth Holmes are predictable, drawn-out and boring, they do not have the necessary accents and really strong moments - the reason, again, in the absence of a clear position about the entrepreneur: at one point her business behavior on the verge of sociopathy is explained by controversial personal qualities, but the next moment she is presented as a completely sincere girl broken by Silicon Valley. In this case, this is not an attempt to show the complexity of the problem, it is a throw from extreme to extreme, which does not allow you to take the right tone. The work line is also not very successful: it surprisingly does not reflect the real scale of Holmes’ success, the height to which she climbed and felt very comfortable for about ten years (an interview with Bill Clinton, a visit by then Vice President Joe Biden, a meeting with Barack Obama and the appointment of one of the ambassadors of his international entrepreneurship program) – the greater the disappointment of the final series, when the viewer was supposed to survive the dizzying fall of the first female billionaire in Silicon Valley, but in fact only a dry statement of fact comes out. With all the praises of Amanda Seifred, the actress is certainly masterful, her heroine is quite ordinary, for nothing that an angular girl, she does not have the creepy discomfort that even now you experience when watching a video with the participation of real Holmes. In some episodes, there are hints of her magnetic charm, with which she literally hypnotized investors, making them believe all her excuses, but everything remains only at the level of conversations, in the frame, Seifred does no miracles. They did not have chemistry with Naveen Andrews as Sunny Balvani (boyfriend Holmes and former chief operating officer of Theranos, whom she accused during court hearings of an abuse that prevented her from soberly assessing the state of affairs in the company) - just two actors honestly reciting the script. “Removed” is good as a seed, as an incentive to go to understand this story further, but certainly not as a statement about the phenomenon of startups or Silicon Valley as a whole, because surprisingly the creators of the series did not find a single clearly formulated idea on this issue.
6 out of 10
What kind of deal are you willing to make for your dreams?
I decided to watch this series only to learn the story of Elizabeth Holmes, but it turned out to be so well-made suspense that starting with the second series it is impossible to break away.
It would seem to be a well-known story about a girl who wanted to change the world, but something went wrong - and you watch the series in one breath.
The main character plays perfectly, specially watched real interviews - very similar, down to the voice (see the original necessarily).
The transformation of a person who cannot stop in pursuit of his goal and makes more and more compromises with conscience is shown very well.
Stephen Fry, Stuart from the Big Bang Theory, the hero loser from the original Fargo and even musician-boyfriend Marnie from the Girls are fun appearances, but not critical.
In general, I expected a biographical crafts - I got a fascinating show. There are two episodes left.