Weekly Streaming Recap: Week of March 4th, 2022

The Dropout (Hulu): There are quite a few strange decisions from a narrative standpoint in the first three episodes of Hulu’s latest original series The Dropout. The story is about Elizabeth Holmes, former head of Theranos who was recently convicted of fraud for her role in the company’s massive conspiracy. The show does something that it would do regardless of the gender of the subject; it frames the initial instance of fraud as a decision made when there is no other option on the table. By the time the meeting with AstraZeneca comes up and the machine to run the tests isn’t working, there is so much that the viewer has seen Elizabeth go through that it almost justifies the fraud that is about to happen.

jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy Part 3 (Netflix): The final entry of the trilogy takes a bit of a turn because of events that may have happened in more recent history. The desire to be timely comes at the detriment of continuing to tell the story of Kanye’s rise leading to a point where nearly a decade of events is just glossed over entirely. The end result feels like a documentary series that was finished by a search engine optimization worker, rather than a documentary filmmaker. Had it always been the intent to end the story with the modern Kanye and try to track what caused him to go from mental state point A to mental state point B, it should have been a Kanye quadrilogy instead of trilogy.

Single Drunk Female (Hulu): A new show on Freeform (formerly ABC Family), Single Drunk Female tells the story of a young woman who hits rock bottom after showing up to work late, assaulting her boss, and going to rehab for alcohol addiction. At its core, it is a redemption story that is pretty well done. Despite seeing Samantha’s mistakes, it is still very easy to root for her because of the fantastic performance given by Sofia Black-D’Elia. While it may seem like a heavy topic to make a show about, it is still a comedy and definitely worth a watch.

You May Have Missed:

V/H/S (Amazon Prime): While V/H/S is not exactly a new movie, it is a great example of a good low budget horror movie. Some of the creative teams behind the shorts that make up this found footage anthology film have gone on to do bigger projects (Scream and Godzilla Vs Kong), making this an excellent exorcise for cinephiles to see the artistic inspirations that went into larger budget films of the last few years. While it’s not nearly the first, or the last, found footage movie, it is a pretty solid example of the genre and it may have gotten lost in the shuffle of the late-2000s/early-2010s surge of found footage horror movies.