Naveen Andrews wears an unidentified watch

Sunny Balwani sits at a white table in the glass-walled Theranos office, hands folded, a gold band on one finger, while beside him Elizabeth Holmes sips the green juice she lived on. Naveen Andrews plays Balwani in The Dropout, the 2022 limited series about Holmes and the blood-testing company she built on a machine that did not work. Balwani was her chief operating officer, her enforcer, and, for years, her secret boyfriend.

On his clasped left wrist is a thin dress watch: a small steel case, a pale silver dial with slim baton markers, and a dark leather strap. It is the discreet, expensive-looking watch of a man who ran the back office, nothing like the gadget Theranos was pretending to sell. No costume database or watch site has put a name to it, and the dial is too small on screen to read, so the make stays unknown.

There is a small irony in that. The Dropout is about a company whose signature product was a fake, and even the watch on the man who guarded its secrets refuses to identify itself.