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[quote=Anonymous]After watching the first episode of the Drop Out (the Elizabeth Holmes show with Amanda Siefried) I'm more annoyed than ever with how they chose to frame this show. I simply do not understand WHY you would take a fairly interesting story about a scam artist and frame it entirely through the lens of the journalist who wrote the exposé about her. Like the Drop Out isn't the best show on TV or anything, but it's decent and interesting. And it would be significantly less so if it was the story of a podcaster researching Elizabeth Holmes for a podcast, instead of just the story of Elizabeth Holmes.

I am a writer and one of the first rules of writing is Cut. To. The. Point. Sure, stories need textures and layers and setting to draw the audience in and help them identify with the story. But you do that by focusing on the most interesting and relevant elements of the story and expanding on them. You don't do that by fixating on peripheral issues that aren't particularly interesting or unique to the story. Like, for instance, the marriage of the journalist who is writing about your main character.

I think they had this idea that the journalist's story would be relevant by creating a parallel with Anna's story -- they are both trying to prove themselves, and both trying to overcome unpleasant things in their pasts by inventing a new, better version of themselves. I think if the journalist's (sorry, refuse to learn her name because I care so little about her) story was more interesting than "I wrote a small article about a kid who turned out to be lying and got in trouble for it" this might have worked. Like if there was something there about her coming from a humble or embarrassing background and cracking the elite publishing circles in New York, but she always had this sense of being an imposter or fraud, then maybe those parallel stories would have worked. But that's really not what was going on.

And using the pregnancy to create dramatic tension makes no sense at all. It's a story about a scam artist! The dramatic tension comes from the very obvious threat of her being found out by literally everyone in her life. Why would you overlook this in order to make the entire story backward-looking, and then use the journalist's impending due date as the driving force of the entire show. What on earth?

Seriously, just awful storytelling. It actually makes me mad. I resent I watched this show and that the people involved got paid so much to make it.[/quote]

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