In early scenes set around the time Holmes began attending Stanford, Seyfried plays her(*) as enthusiastic but socially challenged - “I don’t feel things the way other people feel things,” she admits later to Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), the much older man she falls for on a trip to China - and an idealist who believes she can make the world a better place.

But throughout, it’s not hard to view The Dropout as a tale of adorkability’s dark side. Meriwether is best known for creating the Fox sitcom New Girl, which at first might seem an odd match for a ripped-from-the-headlines account like this.

But showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether and Seyfried do an excellent job of unpacking how Holmes slipped into con artistry, step by step, and how she managed to fool so many people for so long. Revelation-wise, there’s little that’s new in The Dropout, especially if you listened to the podcast of the same name that inspired it. (Even Anna Delvey spends an episode of Inventing Anna helping her boyfriend pitch his dream-journal app.) At one point here, Holmes quotes Mark Zuckerberg’s famous “move fast and break things” mantra, and The Dropout continually illustrates how easy it is to break things and how hard it is to get them right. More often than not, these stories involve the tech sector run amok, trying to reinvent things that already exist and somehow making them worse in the process.

Between The Dropout, Netflix’s con-woman tale Inventing Anna, Showtime’s Uber origin story Super Pumped, and Apple’s upcoming WeWork miniseries WeCrashed, we are nearing Peak Scammer TV.

The boss movie soundtrack