Interest in Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos fraud scandal has surged for a second time this year, driven by buzz around 'You Can See Everything,' Nathan Fielder's record-breaking documentary about the disgraced former Theranos chief executive, according to Variety data cited by the Guardian.
Viewership for 'The Dropout,' the 2022 Hulu drama starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, jumped 186% in September compared with the month before, the data shows, after the previously secret film's existence was revealed on 6 September with the release of its first teaser. Viewership nearly doubled again the following week, suggesting the documentary's rollout — kept under wraps during production — generated a second, sharper spike in curiosity once the full scope of the project became public.
A seven-year-old book gets a second life too
The ripple effects have extended beyond streaming. Audiobook streams of John Carreyrou's 'Bad Blood,' the 2018 investigative book that first laid out the scale of the Theranos fraud, rose roughly 715% in the US over a comparable window, according to the same Luminate-sourced data — evidence that the documentary is pulling a new audience not just back to prior dramatizations but to the original journalism that broke the story.
'You Can See Everything' itself has been widely reviewed as one of the year's most audacious pieces of nonfiction filmmaking, with critics describing it as a 'modern masterpiece of deceit' that uses Fielder's signature blend of documentary and staged reenactment to probe how Holmes was able to deceive investors, patients and her own employees for years before Theranos collapsed.
You can't make this stuff up.
From ongoing critical commentary on the Theranos saga, as cited by the Guardian
Why the Theranos story keeps resurfacing
Part of the appeal, entertainment writers argue, is that the Theranos scandal keeps generating new angles even years after Holmes's 2022 conviction for fraud: new court filings, new interviews and now an entirely new documentary structure have each reopened public fascination with how a Stanford dropout convinced some of Silicon Valley's most sophisticated investors that she had reinvented blood testing. Fielder's approach, which reportedly involved extraordinary secrecy during production to avoid tipping off Holmes or her allies before release, has itself become part of the story's appeal.
What happens next
With the film still expanding into more theaters and awards-season chatter building, entertainment analysts expect the viewership bump for 'The Dropout' and renewed interest in 'Bad Blood' to continue through the end of the year. For A24, which backed the documentary, the secondary surge in older Theranos content is itself being read in Hollywood as evidence of just how effectively the project's cloak-and-dagger marketing worked.
