Inventing Anna, The Dropout, and More: Why Biopic Series About Business Scandals Are All The Rage These Days

We are just about a third's way into the year, and it's about time I say this: 2022 is the year of based-on-a-true-story limited series about business scandals. Seriously, just look at all that has been yielded so far!

Netflix's Inventing Anna involves a foreign protagonist faking her way through USA to fund a foundation.

Hulu's The Dropout is about a female CEO whose promising healthcare venture fell down from fraud.

Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout (left) and Julia Garner as Anna Delvey Sorokin in Inventing Anna (right)
(Goodness, the similarity between these two posters is uncanny!)

Showtime's Super Pumped centres on the incident of a rideshare company's board upon its inception.

And Apple TV+'s WeCrashed tells the story of how the notorious couple behind WeWork...well, crashed.

Why should we care about these stories now?

Especially this year in particular, when society is entering a post-pandemic world.

Let's look at two of these shows more closely, Inventing Anna and The Dropout, which are both centred on female fraudsters, but anyway... 

Note: I'm not the expert here, I'm still trying to figure out why a bunch of these sorts of shows are being dumped out and critically acclaimed during this time, the sort that I'm more interested in myself. They may not be the most popular shows of the moment (ahem...HBO), but they're up there out of all the series that streaming services in particular have been putting out so far in 2022 (as of April).

1. They're about recent events

Though the main events of The Dropout begin in the 2000s, when a young Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford to start her promising company Theranos, most of the timeline when the fraud unfolds occurs within the last decade. In fact, the young whistleblowers of this case were working at the company as of 2013, and the testimony footage of Elizabeth shown throughout the series is dated to 2017, which is five years before the day I write this (and as of this time, she is still awaiting her sentence). As for Inventing Anna, its events, including the timeline of the article's conception, predominantly take place in the 2010s. 

2. Much of the information comes from a mix of primary and secondary sources

While the events depicted in these series are echoed throughout countless articles, the real sources of research consulted to pen the script are more than (or maybe not) just that. For example, The Dropout is an adaption of the ABC News podcast of the same name, which itself is accompanied by a plethora of books (like Bad Blood, which is set as the base for another adaptation, this time a movie by Adam McKay, starring Jennifer Lawrence, who, not gonna lie, was the only actor I felt would be suited to the role), text messages between Holmes and her partner-in-crime Sunny Balwani, audio tapes, and video footage. The same could be said about Inventing Anna, which is a sort of adaption of an article, but some of the actual people involved in Anna Sorokin's scam did directly contribute to the Shondaland series. Even Anna Sorokin herself had to get some compensation from Netflix/Shondaland for using her likeness in the show.

3. The events depicted are shockingly accurate considering the real thing

That is at least according to some YouTube videos I've watched from a channel I won't name and articles from a site I also won't name, but still, even with some slight changes (notably to some characters' names and likeness), much of the information weaved into these series holds true to the actual events. This includes some of the details that I thought were too good to be true when I watched them play out on the screen; for instance, Anna creating a fake persona to speak to the bank using a voice modifier app and a fake SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card proxy. Also, as an example from The Dropout, Richard Fuisz seemed to me like a character that was made up just to add a little extra conflict to Elizabeth's journey of creating her dream venture at first. However, as it so turns out, Richard Fuisz is a real guy, who made patents and filed a lawsuit because of Elizabeth's credit on the patent for the Theranos machine. Woah!

4. Actors most known for the fictional characters they've portrayed play the main characters

I'll admit it, I've never watched Mean Girls, it's as old as I am, but I do know that Amanda Seyfried, who plays Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout was in it as her most well-known character: Regina George. As for the actor playing the titular role of Inventing Anna, Julia Garner, she is most well-known for her role as Ruth on an another Netflix Series: Ozark. Sure enough, that show is realistic, it's about the surprisingly real crime of money laundering, but it's not adapted completely from a true story like Inventing Anna is. 

5. Techniques used to establish the timeline of events are very cinematic

What more can I say? It's just an extended movie spliced into a few parts.

6. It finds the balance between getting facts right and telling a dramatized story to a savvy audience

This is perhaps the thing that drew me (and plenty of others, I suppose) to these sorts of series. While a documentary or docuseries can give you loads of information about real-life events, and a drama can stretch the truth about particular events in the real world (whether modern or historical), a convincing biopic movie or series should find the in-between (at least that's what I believe). In other words, it should contain just as much informative restraints as entertaining liberties, blending accuracy and art into the perfect mixture. As far as I could see with Inventing Anna and The Dropout, they seem to fit this model quite well, better than I had initially expected them to be. True story: when I saw that Amanda Seyfried was cast to portray the infamous Elizabeth Homes, I had my doubts, but now having watched it, I am so drawn by her performance (yet part of me still feels that Jennifer Lawrence will kick butt, in less time)

BONUS! 7. The true protagonists of these stories aren't the ones you think they are

Spoiler alert! Inventing Anna's true protagonist is Vivian Kent, the reporter behind the article that made Anna Sorokin's case come to light in court (after Rachel Williams' op-ed for Vanity Fair, that is), while I reckon the true protagonists of The Dropout are Tyler Schulz and Erika Cheung, the young ex-employees of Theranos that exposed the company's flaws and took Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani to court (To be honest, I was very interested in learning more about their arcs, other than Elizabeth's).

So what business scandals should get the small screen treatment next? Here's some of my ideas:

• The GameStop bubble of early 2021, where young Reddit users beat the old hedge fund guys
• WikiLeaks' Julien Assange, who was responsible for the online exposure of confidential info
• Scooter Braun's purchase of Big Machine Records (I say it's a scandal because it upset Taylor Swift)
• That couple responsible for a crypto hack/scam; they were recently convicted, I believe
• Podcaster Joe Rogan getting cancelled (okay, maybe not a business scandal, but it's scandalous)
• The fallout of the Cuomo brothers in the 2020s

Yeah, I went too far on that last one...

What recent business scandal would you love to see come alive as a TV show? Let me know in the comments, along with your dream casting choices (Drax from the MCU as Joe Rogan, anyone? No, fine).