Showing 1 - 7 of 7 annotations in the genre "TV Program"

Severance

Stiller, Ben

Last Updated: Nov-21-2022
Annotated by:
Brungardt, Gerard

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: TV Program

Summary:

The titular "severance" surgical procedure is the ultimate answer to the work-life balance conundrum - separating work consciousness from personal consciousness. The person's work-self has no memory or knowledge of their personal-self, and vice versa. Lumon Industries and its employees do this for seemingly good reasons (e.g. to assuage grief) but unanticipated and darker motives are in tension throughout the series as its nine episodes follow a core team of four office workers navigating the realities of having had this procedure done.

View full annotation

The Dropout

Meriwether, Elizabeth

Last Updated: May-19-2022
Annotated by:
Sood, Shefali

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: TV Program

Summary:

Based on the 2021 podcast of the same title produced by Rebecca Jarvis, The Dropout is an 8-episode miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried as the infamous biotechnology fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and Naveen Andrews as her much older boyfriend-turned-accomplice, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. The miniseries documents the real-life story of Elizabeth Holmes and her evolution from an ambitious, dedicated and somewhat awkward teenager into a ruthless, immoral and still quite awkward CEO of Theranos, a company she founded after dropping out of Stanford her sophomore year. She claimed to develop technology to run hundreds of diagnostic medical tests on a single drop of a patient’s blood. She defrauded hundreds of doctors, investors, pharmaceutical companies and even Walgreens along the way and put hundreds of patients who received faulty Theranos blood test results at risk. This year, Holmes was found guilty on four counts of fraud by a federal grand jury.

The miniseries begins in Holmes’ childhood and utilizes footage from her federal deposition and media interviews to document her evolution from having an innocent desire to invent something to help people to a grifter who put others in danger without a second thought. In her teenage years, Holmes idolizes Steve Jobs. Instead of boyband posters in her room, she has photos of him with Apple products. She spends a summer in China in a language immersion program, where she meets a man 30 years her senior, Sunny Balwani, and strikes up an uncomfortable friendship after learning of his success in business. She is shown to be somewhat of an outcast in school, practicing being excited for a party in a mirror and speaking almost every day with Balwani instead of her peers. Her conversations with Balwani mostly are about her ideas to help people and her desire to be a billionaire. This goal of helping others pushes her to study biomedical engineering at Stanford. She proudly proclaims to family friend Dr. Richard Fuisz, a physician-turned-inventor, that she is in the top 10% of applicants. At Stanford, she is incredibly focused on her goal to invent, and with an unrelenting fervor, she enrolls in graduate level classes and pitches ideas to professors. She is a teacher’s pet; however, when she pitches her idea for a medical drug delivery patch to Dr. Phyliss Gardner, a highly accomplished physician and researcher, her world crashes. Dr. Gardner immediately shoots down her idea and tells her to focus on her schoolwork before trying to invent the next big thing. Holmes can’t take no for an answer and quotes Yoda from Star Wars: “Do or do not. There is no try.” Dr. Gardner responds that in medicine and science, some things are impossible and recognizing that is also part of the scientific process.

This all changes soon after pitching an idea for a blood test using a single drop of blood to Dr. Channing Robertson, an influential chemical engineer at Stanford. He backs her idea and gives her capital for a company. She encourages her parents to let her drop out of Stanford, citing Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and other influential tech leaders as examples, and uses her tuition money to establish Theranos.   

Theranos, a combination of the words therapy and diagnosis, takes off, with significant roadblocks, fueled only by Holmes' dreams. Holmes neither has the scientific background nor the leadership skills to lead the company.  She does little in the chemistry labs and her lack of engineering, chemistry and medical knowledge prevents her from being able to pitch the idea successfully to healthcare venture capitalists. The blood testing device requires technology that would take years to build and require significant scientific collaboration that does not exist at Theranos. She needs data for investors that the devices are complete and work, so enrolls the faulty, not yet completed devices in a trial testing the blood of cancer patients. This leads to a tense encounter between lead engineer Edmond Ku and Holmes outside a cancer clinic. Ku states that he is an engineer, not a healthcare provider, and he is uncomfortable looking these patients in the eye and testing their blood on a machine he knows does not work. He is clearly very upset; but Holmes forces him to go inside and collect the samples. The clinical trial goes nowhere. 

After almost running the company into the ground, she convinces the Board to let her stay CEO if she brings on Balwani, with whom she is in a romantic relationship, as chief operating officer. Balwani offers advice on how to be a CEO of a tech company and encourages her to change her management style. The departments at Theranos become siloed to a point that scientists have no idea what is happening in the executive, marketing and media departments and vice versa. All information comes from Holmes. She spends no more time in the lab and has no meetings with lab personnel, but her name is on every patent. She markets herself as a young female tech CEO in a landscape dominated by men in sweatshirts. Her charisma and newfound business acumen allows her to secure a deal with Walgreens in which Theranos’ devices will be in Walgreens Wellness Centers for use by patients. She does not tell any of the scientists working on the device and does not consult any physicians. She shares no data with Walgreens about the design of the device, its accuracy or validity, citing trade secrets. When her lead chemist, the celebrated Dr. Ian Gibbons, catches wind of this plan, he confronts Holmes, who fires him on the spot for not having the same vision. Amidst pressure from the scientists, she rehires him the next day, but prevents him from working in the lab ever again. The toxic environment created by Holmes eventually causes Dr. Gibbons to commit suicide.   

The Theranos devices for the Walgreens agreement fail quality control checks and cannot be used.  Holmes and Balwani create a plan in which they use Siemens devices with Theranos logos to run the single drop blood patient samples which have been diluted to provide enough sample to be read by the Siemens machine. This leads to wildly inaccurate results being sent to patients. Examples include a high estrogen reading in a woman with a history of ovarian cancer, suggesting remission; a high thyroid hormone level in a pregnant woman already on thyroid medication, almost prompting her doctor to alter her dosage, which would be fatal for the fetus; and a high troponin level in a man with cardiovascular disease indicating he may be having a myocardial infarction. The lab technicians are aware of these inaccurate results. Eventually two techs, Erika Cheung and Tyler Schultz, the grandson of former Secretary of State George Schultz a and a Board member at Theranos, leak what is happening to a journalist, John Carreyrou at the Wall Street Journal, despite immense legal and physical threats from Holmes and Balwani. Eventually, using evidence from Cheung, Schultz, former scientists at Theranos, and physician-advocates among others, Carreyrou writes an article in the Journal exposing Theranos and Holmes for what they are --frauds. This spirals into the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shutting down Theranos labs indefinitely and leads to thousands of lawsuits regarding Theranos products. Holmes loses all credibility and is arrested on federal charges of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.   

In the last scene, Holmes visits the office with her new dog to speak with a former Theranos lawyer, who can no longer find a job as a result of the scandal. She boasts about her new boyfriend. The lawyer confronts her, “you hurt people.” Holmes denies this vehemently saying she just ‘failed to deliver’ as CEO and runs frantically out of the office where she breaks down while waiting for her Uber. 


View full annotation

Dopesick

Strong, Danny

Last Updated: Jan-12-2022
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: TV Program

Summary:

The eight-part TV miniseries, Dopesick, is a nonfiction, scripted drama inspired by Beth Macy’s nonfiction book of the same title. The creator, Danny Strong, was a writer of all but one episode, director of two, and an executive producer of them all. Beth Macy served as an executive producer and contributed to the writing and updated the reporting. 

In a Kaiser Health News (KHN) panel discussion about the series with Danny Strong, Beth Macy, and three KHN staff members, Strong said his original goal “was to dramatize all this, was to create a clear record of what Purdue Pharma did.” But when Macy joined, his goal expanded “to show the victims and to hopefully redefine the stereotype of addiction...[and] ultimately our goal was to show a path forward.”

The miniseries conforms to these goals. Across the eight episodes, the drama mostly swirls around the direct connections among Purdue Pharma, one physician, one particular patient (and family), one small town in coal mining country, a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) investigator, and a U.S. Attorney (Western District of Virginia). In hewing to Strong’s original goal of portraying Purdue Pharma’s responsibility for igniting and fanning addiction to its product OxyContin® (oxycodone HCl), the drama reaches its climax when the company agrees to criminal charges for named executives and a financial settlement in 2007. 

Different episodes touch on other goals about the stigma associated with addiction and access to medication-assisted treatments. While Strong met his goals, he acknowledges the real-life drama didn’t end with the 2007 settlement. He previews what was to come: Purdue Pharma redoubling its sales efforts, the addiction crisis worsening over the subsequent fourteen years, and the continuing efforts to bring Purdue Pharma and its owners (the Sackler family) to their knees.

View full annotation

Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: TV Program

Summary:

The Knick was inspired by the Knickerbocker Hospital, founded in Harlem in 1862 to serve the poor. In this 20-part TV series spread out over two seasons, the fictional Knick is somewhere in the lower half of Manhattan around 1900. The time covered during the series is not marked in any distinct way. The characters don’t age much, and although fashion and customs remain static during the series, the scope and significance of advancements that come into play were actually adopted over a longer time than the episodes cover.   

The series builds on some known history. The central character, the chief surgeon Dr. John Thackery, is modeled on a famous surgeon of the time, Dr. William Halsted, in both his surgical adventurism and in his drug addictions. The character Dr. Algernon Edwards, who is an African-American, Harvard-educated, and European-trained surgeon, is based in part on Dr. Louis T. Wright, who became the first African-American surgeon at Harlem Hospital during the first half of the 20th century.  

Storylines of human drama and folly run through the series. Among them are medical cases both ordinary and bizarre, heroic successes and catastrophic failures, loves won and lost, gilded lives and wretched existences, honor and corruption, racism and more racism. Within and around these storylines are the scientific, medical, and industrial advances of the period, as well as the social contexts that form fin de si
ècle hospital care and medical research in New York City.
 

Some of the industrial advances we see adopted by the hospital include electrification, telephone service, and electric-powered ambulances. We see that transitions to these new technologies are not without risks and catastrophes: patients and hospital staff are electrocuted, and when the ambulance batteries died -- a frequent occurrence-- many of the patients they carried died, too.

Medical advances integrated into various episodes include x-rays, electric-powered suction devices, and an inflatable balloon for intrauterine compression to stop bleeding. Thackery is a driven researcher taking on some of the big problems of the day, such as making blood transfusions safe, curing syphilis, and discovering the physiologic mechanisms of drug addiction. We see how he learns at the cost of his patients, or rather his subjects. We also glimpse movements directed at population health. For example, epidemiological methods are applied to find the source of a typhoid outbreak, which drew from the actual case of Mary Mallon (aka, Typhoid Mary). Shown juxtaposed to the advances epidemiology was then promising is the concurrent interest that was rising in eugenics and its broad application to control for unwanted groups. Research ethics and regulations were a long way off.


View full annotation

Annotated by:
Henderson, Schuyler

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: TV Program

Summary:

Written by Julian Fellowes and starring a glamorous cast of pensive thespians, Downton Abbey has been a Masterpiece Theater phenomenon on PBS and a hit in the United Kingdom.  The show follows the fortunes of the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants in the titular Downton Abbey during the first decades of the twentieth century.  The British Upper Class (amongst the original one-percenters) is cleaving to a status and an identity that will soon be coming to an end thanks to World Wars, revolutions, universal suffrage, and electricity - even in the kitchens.

View full annotation

Summary:

Some 40 years after a ceasefire that ended the Cylon wars, the 12 human colonies across the galaxy have been lulled into a state of calm complacence.  This is abruptly interrupted by a Cylon attack that annihilates billions of humans, leaving only 50,000 survivors in a small fleet of ships, led by the one remaining ship from the Colonial Fleet, the Battlestar Galactica.  Fleeing the Cylons, they set out to find the legendary 13th Colony: Earth.

View full annotation

Annotated by:
Spiegel, Maura

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: TV Program

Summary:

This three-part BBC television miniseries centers on the large weekend reunion of a prosperous Anglo-Jewish family at a luxurious West End hotel.  Various family members discover one another and uncover family stories and secrets that reorient them in their lives.  Writer-Director Stephen Poliakoff does not adhere to a conventional story structure, and this wandering tale is full of unexpected and rewarding narrative dips and turns.
 
Two family clusters are followed most closely in the story, although we are given glimpses, through flashback, of other compelling characters’ intricate wartime histories.   One branch of the family is made up of Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen) and his parents, Raymond and Esther Symon (Michael Gambon and Jill Baker) who have grown distant from the larger family circle following a well-intentioned but failed business venture that cost Raymond his share of the family wealth.  Daniel, intrigued by his glamorous relatives, is drawn more and more deeply into a relationship with his seductive and mysterious cousin Rebecca (Claire Skinner) and her dashing brother Charles (Toby Stephens).  In the course of the weekend, crusty but endearing Raymond suffers a minor stroke, and we learn of the recent death of Rebecca and Charles’ eldest brother following his descent into mental illness.

The most meaningful connections, however, belong to the past, and are brought to light in stages, effectively engaging our curiosity.  The stories behind two captivating photographs, one of Raymond’s father dancing fancifully and uncharacteristically on a lawn, and one of Daniel at age three, unaccountably dressed as an Italian Prince, are eventually uncovered to reveal a secret history that holds quite different meanings for Daniel and his father. 
 

View full annotation