It's hard to imagine Elizabeth Holmes draped in glow sticks—but The Dropout nearly gave it to us.
In the Hulu limited series, Amanda Seyfried stars as Holmes, the bio-tech entrepreneur and founder of Theranos who was found guilty on four counts of fraud in January 2022.
While The Dropout, which detailed the rise and fall of the start-up and its founder, ends on a solemn note—with Holmes and her dog getting into an Uber after an argument with Theranos lawyer Linda Tanner (Michaela Watkins)—the series nearly took a very different approach to its final moments.
"For the ending, we initially had envisioned it at Burning Man," showrunner Elizabeth Meriweather revealed to The Hollywood Reporter Aug. 11, "because she made this trip to Burning Man with her new fiancé, Billy [Evans], and they had posted all over Instagram about it, and it just felt like a really interesting place for a quote-unquote rebirth."
Indeed, as her company was crumbling to the ground—as the fraud indictment loomed ahead—Holmes partied with Evans at the desert art gathering in 2018, according to the New York Times. (The pair married in a secret wedding the following year.)
Meriweather wanted to show the couple's journey to the festival, but the universe had other plans.
"It was weirdly a blessing in disguise because with COVID, we were definitely not going to Burning Man," she explained. "We had to rethink that whole ending, and it just became her getting into an Uber, which totally worked."
The fact that it all worked out so well is made even more impressive in that Meriweather said she went into the finale with a major case of writer's block.
"I was really afraid of writing the finale," she admitted. "I kept putting it off. I'd been putting it off for way too long and Hulu was like, ‘You need to write this finale!' It was definitely hard for me, like, ‘How do I wrap this story up in a way, when it's ongoing?'
After The Dropout earned a total of six Emmy nominations—including an acting nod for Seyfried, a writing nom for Meriweather and a nomination for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series—we'd say things worked out just fine.
All episodes of The Dropout are available to stream on Hulu.