The biggest buzz in entertainment this fall is the amazing documentary on Elizabeth Holmes from A24 co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, You Can See Everything. The film is certain to earn an Academy Award nomination in its category. The only question is whether it could become the first documentary nominated for Best Picture.
You Can See Everything examines the strange last 30+ days of freedom for Holmes, a disgraced convicted felon and former tech “billionaire.” But as Fielder and Oppenheim navigate the days before Holmes goes off to federal prison for her fraudulent activity, a co-star steals the show: Billy Evans.
Could Evans be a surprise host on Saturday Night Live this season? It would be a stunning “get” for SNL, which is obviously trying to keep itself relevant in a world where social media, indie films, and YouTube channels often get as many eyeballs as the network show does.
Evans is the partner of Holmes and father to their two young children. In the film, Evans emerges as a self-absorbed, arrogant Nepo baby who tries to manipulate the filming process. Never once in the doc does Evans seem like a genuine human being. Instead he seems like a scripted villain spitting out inane dialogue and trying to appear smarter and more important than he is. It’s as if everything terrible about social media and modern pop culture came to life in human form and called itself “Billy Evans.”
In You Can See Everything the audience is presented a “family” in the final weeks of trying to piece together something out of the shambles that remains from Holmes’ crimes. The former CEO of Theranos once claimed to have invented a “magic box” that could take a tiny dose of blood and test it for hundreds of diseases. She promised to revolutionize health care, making lab-testing obsolete and delivering a product to patients of all financial means. Instead, in 2018 her charade was exposed as a fraud. The device never did what she claimed, and in 2022, she was convicted of wire fraud and multiple felonies. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
But Evans is the creepy star of the documentary. He’s the one that seems to have been pulling the strings (solo or with Holmes blessings) during the final months of her freedom. He’s allegedly using Holmes’ likeness to make money while she is in prison, far away from her young children. Evans is spearheading another blood-testing device on behalf of Holmes, angling to make billions.
In a twisting film that spans several years, pre and post incarceration for Holmes, it’s Evans who divvies out access to her, shielding Fielder from the woman even as the director begins to fall into a confusion over whether she really knew she was breaking the law.
If Evans were to be asked to come out of his “bunker” and host SNL, it’s almost certain he would accept. The heir to a hotel fortune is addicted to attention, and addicted to controlling the narrative about his nascent family. The question is whether Lorne Michaels, NBC, and its sponsors would be on board for Evans to stand on that magic spot in Studio 8H and host the longest-running variety program in history.
There’s little doubt the ratings would be off the charts.
