Hulu

Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of biotech firm Theranos, built a company valued at $9 billion on the claim that its Edison device could run hundreds of medical tests on a single drop of blood.

Holmes got hundreds of millions from investors like Larry Ellison, Don Lucas, Rupert Murdoch and Walmart’s Walton family, and she became the darling of Silicon Valley.

The thing Holmes couldn’t get was a machine that actually worked, and her empire collapsed under the weight of its lies. In January, she was convicted on four counts of defrauding investors, and has become a symbol of tech startups’ culture of “fake it till you make it.”

Amanda Seyfried stars as Holmes in Hulu’s limited series The Dropout, which depicts how a gifted teenager with vision and ambition morphed into a power- and fame-hungry tycoon unable or unwilling to distinguish reality from her own hype.

“From a psychology point of view, if you want to believe something badly enough, and you work so hard to make it true, physically and emotionally, then at some point you’re just going to have to choose whether or not it’s true,” Seyfried says. “And I think we’re capable of such crazy things. Our brains are miraculous, and we can forget things, we can bury things, and we can create things. And [Holmes] was incredible at creating things. She was also incredible at creating the story of Theranos and her invention.”

Naveen Andrews (Lost) stars as Holmes’ boyfriend and business partner, Sunny Balwani, and the cast also includes Alan Ruck, Kurtwood Smith, Laurie Metcalf, Michael Ironside, Stephen Fry and William H. Macy.

The first three episodes debut March 3, with subsequent episodes released Thursdays.