If last year’s thrilling race for best actress in a limited series was defined, largely, by characters facing down their pain—winner Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown, Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen’s Gambit, Michaela Coel in I May Destroy You, Elizabeth Olsen in WandaVision—then this season’s cycle is sure to turn that on its head with glee. Instead of portraits of grief and trauma, we’re overflowing with tales of scams and cons.

And just as with 2021’s crop, we’ve got a similarly impressive batch of actors playing these roles too: Emmy winner Julia Garner had a ball as a fake German heiress in Inventing Anna, while right now, you can watch Anne Hathaway spin new age mumbo jumbo in WeCrashed and Elle Fanning text a boyfriend toward tragedy in The Girl From Plainville. But heading into the homestretch, and with a bracing finale behind her, The Dropout’s Amanda Seyfried seems like the one to beat right now.

It helps that the Oscar nominee (Mank) has headed up such a popular, widely acclaimed series. WeCrashed and Inventing Anna, particularly, boast similar star power but have met more mixed reviews. Hulu’s The Dropout, which chronicles the rise and fall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, led spring’s scammer craze by operating in a delicate kind of tragicomic mode, and fleshing its world out with a compelling supporting cast. Seyfried ably led the way.

Her vocal transformation—another big trend this season, extending also to HBO Max’s Julia and the upcoming The Staircase—evoked Holmes’s iconic, exceedingly deep affectation without mimicking it. In tune with the writing, Seyfried found sympathetic notes to hit early on, playing Holmes as an ambitious college student with a big idea before seamlessly charting her descent into darkness. Seyfried moved sharply between the character’s public and private selves. She keyed into a certain unknowability too, playing harrowing scenes with layers ranging from ambivalence to guilt to a cruel sort of thrill.

This comes to a head in the finale, now streaming on Hulu, as Elizabeth effectively meets her fate and Theranos’s house of cards tumbles. Here showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether confronts, head on, what may have been going on in her troubled protagonist’s head. Upon being thrown under the bus, Elizabeth’s lover and business partner, Sunny (Naveen Andrews), wonders whether she’s all but dead inside. Elizabeth can’t respond, choosing to literally run away instead, but in the episode’s final moments, as she waits outside for an Uber, she lets out a loud, primal scream, a freeing expression of agony. In Seyfried’s explosion, The Dropout makes a convincing argument that there’s surely life underneath that black turtleneck—hot, messy, and boiling over. You see eight episodes of careful buildup play out on her face.

It’s the sort of ending, to be very simplistic about these things, that wins you an Emmy. Seyfried presents a complete embodiment of a well-known public figure, striking a tricky balance with the confidence of a star in her prime. As we can expect the show to go reasonably far come Emmy time, so too is she a contender with legs. Indeed, this category has long been kind to careful reclamations of well-known public figures, from Julianne Moore’s Sarah Palin (Game Change) to Sarah Paulson’s Marcia Clark (The People v. O.J. Simpson) to Michelle Williams’s Gwen Verdon (Fosse/Verdon).

Of course, the limited races are also more competitive than ever. Seyfried will have to fend off Maid’s Margaret Qualley, already a SAG nominee for her heartbreaking turn, as well as newly minted Oscar winner Jessica Chastain (Scenes From a Marriage). And we’ve yet to gauge the chances of the starry trio of The First Lady, or Claire Foy in A Very British Scandal (yes, more scandal!), or Julia Roberts in Gaslit, or Jessica Biel in Candy, all of whom will get a push. I could go on! But if we can call this a true race, we can also call Seyfried our early front-runner. She’s got what it takes. 

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