Elizabeth Holmes’ trial almost remade ‘The Dropout.’ Why it was left out

Liz Meriwether, the creator of “New Girl” and “Single Parents,” became fascinated with Elizabeth Holmes in 2019, much like the rest of us. She remembers being drawn in by a Vanity Fair piece that detailed the Silicon Valley wunderkind’s final months at her biotech company, Theranos, which promised to revolutionize blood testing but was ultimately consumed by fraud allegations. Intrigued by the dramatic story, she also listened to the ABC News podcast “The Dropout,” which detailed Holmes’ rise and fall.

“I felt a lot of the similarities in my life with her,” Meriwether says. “We’re similar in age, we have the same name, and just that experience of being young and female in a position of power quickly.”

For those who need a refresher: In 2004, at 20, Holmes dropped out of Stanford University to launch the startup. At its peak in 2014, the company was valued at over $9 billion and Holmes was a darling of the New Yorker, Forbes and other outlets; by 2015, Holmes, then 31, was named the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes. Just months later, the Wall Street Journal exposed shortcomings in Theranos’ technology, setting in motion the company’s, and Holmes’, staggering fall.

As Theranos was building momentum — enlisting as board members two former U.S. secretaries of State, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, and entering a partnership with Walgreens — Meriwether was launching her own dizzying kind of startup: her first TV series, “New Girl” on Fox.

“I felt like I could make sense of choices she made up to a certain point,” Meriwether says. “The idea of being a young woman in power without many role models of other women in power and sort of flailing with that, it felt like something I hadn’t really seen on television before. So that part of the story is something I feel uniquely able to tell just based on my experiences. … That kind of scared me a little bit. And that made me want to tell this.”

A note of encouragement, along with a figurine from the newly re-booted “Fraggle Rock,” produced by her husband Alex Cuthbertson, in the home office of Liz Meriwether

(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times)

By the time Searchlight Television, the studio that produced the series, reached out to Meriwether about adapting the podcast , Holmes’ story had also been told in a best-selling book and a documentary. “What about this story needs to be told again?” Meriwether wondered.

“When I dug deeper, and when I looked at the story from all the angles that it had been told, what I realized is that there hadn’t really been a version of it that tried to get inside of her mind, tried to get inside of her point of view. That became my North Star for this project: How do we tell this story from her point of view as much as we can? I remember going into the pitch at Searchlight and feeling like I didn’t even know how connected to the story I was and then the more I started talking about it, the more I noticed myself outside of my body — like, ‘Oh, I am really emotionally involved in this.’”