Few characters haunt the American imagination like the con artist. From Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man to Hickey in The Iceman Cometh to The Music Man’s Harold Hill, these personalities act as oracles of our personal and national fate. They whisper in our ears that all of it — our hopes, our ideals, our triumphs — is fraudulent. In a culture that allows for personal reinvention like no other, the line between the con and the king almost vanishes. America gave us Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. It also gave us Ferdinand Ward and Bernie Madoff. At some level that scares us, there’s no difference. The horror of the con artist lies in the fact that you can’t detect him until it’s too late. The gangster is killed at the end of the movie, the cowboy rides away. But the con man walks among us. He marries your daughter and bilks you of your fortune. Worse: She is your daughter.

And her name is Elizabeth Holmes. Fresh off her conviction in federal court, Holmes has burst back into the public square as the subject of the limited series The Dropout on Hulu. With her performance as the infamous millennial, Amanda Seyfried adds a new name to the list of indelible American hucksters. Played out over eight taut episodes, her portrayal offers us a window into Holmes’s evolution from an everyday teenager into a tyrannical tycoon — the founder and CEO of Theranos, the blood-testing startup that defrauded investors of millions and destroyed untold lives. Seyfried not only transforms herself into Holmes in an uncanny fashion but also discloses the way the character transformed herself. The show deftly illustrates how Holmes used her self-proclaimed idealism to trade on the goodwill of others — mentors who admired her for wanting to change the world.