The Dropout

The Dropout is Rebecca Jarvis’s ABC News serial about Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos, and the investors and patients who were told a finger-prick could replace a lab.

Jarvis reported the company for years. The podcast uses that reporting as a timeline: the voice, the board, the employees who tried to say the machine did not work.

The series is the narrative version of a business scandal, with Holmes as a character and the lab as the plot. It is more interested in who stayed quiet than in the later screen adaptation.

Season one is the complete rise and fall. Later updates about the sentencing are an afterword. Start with the founding, or the fear in the lab will not have a setup.