There’s an interesting content pipeline happening right now, as viral articles, podcasts and documentaries are turned into various series with movie stars stepping into these fictionalized adaptations of splashy true-life scandals. That trend reaches boiling point this spring, with several of these limited series dropping within a few months of each other. They’re just so good, you’ll want to relive these wild stories all over again.
Remember March 2020? It was a time of hand sanitizer, sourdough starters and never leaving the house. In this dark and uncertain time, one man brought us comfort, and his name was Joe Exotic. The Netflix docuseries “Tiger King” was a beacon of togetherness as we collectively binged the antics of Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin and the rest of the big cats enthusiasts. Just two years later, there’s a miniseries, “Joe vs. Carole,” with John Cameron Mitchell donning Joe’s signature mullet, and Kate McKinnon taking on the role of Carole. The series premieres Thursday on Peacock and is based on the Wondrey podcast, “Over My Dead Body: Joe vs. Carole," hosted by journalist Robert Moor, which came out right before the Netflix series. The podcast dives a bit deeper into the legendary feud between Joe and Carole, so it’s worth checking this one out, at least to see Mitchell channel Exotic.
Also this week, arriving Friday on Hulu, is a story fresh from the headlines: “The Dropout,” a limited series about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of defrauding investors in January 2022. The series is created by Elizabeth Meriwether and stars Amanda Seyfried as Holmes and Naveen Andrews as her former romantic and business partner Sunny Balwani. The show is based on the 2019 podcast of the same name, and there’s plenty of Holmes content to go around, including Alex Gibney’s 2019 documentary “The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley" (on HBO Max) and the book, “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the Theranos story and is played in the series by Eben Moss-Bachrach.
Seyfried delivers a phenomenal performance as Holmes, who affected an usually low voice and started fashioning herself after Apple’s Steve Jobs. But Seyfried offers more than just mimicry. Her Elizabeth is an awkward, complicated person with grandiose vision who starts to believe her own lies, even as she consciously crafts them. The rise and fall of Theranos was a reckoning for the girlboss tech hustle culture that allowed Holmes to get as far as she did, and the series engages with why she was able to do what she did, despite so many red flags along the way.
Another embattled entrepreneur’s story comes to streaming on Apple TV+ on March 18, with the premiere of “WeCrashed,” based on the Wondrey podcast about Adam Neumann and his own larger-than-life ambitions for the co-working space WeWork. “The Office” writer Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello wrote and created the series, with Jared Leto taking on the role of the outrageous Israeli Neumann and Anne Hathaway co-starring as his wife Rebekah.
Neumann fared far better than Holmes, who is facing 20 years in prison for fraud, while he received a billion dollar golden parachute after being ousted by his board for flying too close to the sun. For even more WeWork, watch Hulu’s 2021 doc “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn” directed by Jed Rothstein, or check out Episode 5 of “Generation Hustle” on HBO Max. There are also two books about the rise and fall of the founder, Reeves Weidemann’s “Billion Dollar Loser,” and “The Cult of We” by Elliott Brown and Maureen Farrell.
Also on “Generation Hustle,” Scam Queen Anna Delvey (she gets Episode 4), the young fashionista who passed herself off as a German heiress and stole hundreds of thousands from friends and banks in the process of trying to start an art-based social club in New York City. Jessica Pressler at New York Magazine wrote the definitive Anna Delvey piece in 2018, “Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It,” which now serves as the basis for the Netflix series “Inventing Anna,” which dropped on Feb. 11. Julia Garner stars as Anna, while Anna Chlumsky co-stars as the journalist chasing down her story. It’s a fascinating exploration of what it’s like to try to understand and explain someone as seemingly remorseless as Anna.
Dive into these ripped-from-the headlines stories, which are so much stranger than fiction, they’re juicy enough to relive, too.
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