A version of this story about Michael Showalter and “The Dropout” first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Back when Michael Showalter was a cast member of MTV’s “The State,” or the co-writer and star of “Wet Hot American Summer,” or the creator of the series “Search Party,” you wouldn’t necessarily have picked him as a candidate to be the first director to guide one actress to an Oscar win and another to an Emmy win in the same year. But Showalter accomplished the first part of that feat in March when Jessica Chastain won the Best Actress Oscar for Showalter’s “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” — and now he’s in pretty good shape to seal the deal because he directed the first four of the eight episodes of the limited series “The Dropout,” which made Amanda Seyfried an Emmy favorite for her performance as the ambitious but disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.