Many would tell you that Netflix in the 2020s is but a shadow of its former self. Cast your mind back to the 2010s, when the streaming giant was genuinely challenging HBO's crown as the premier producer of quality television in America and beyond. Those were the days of House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and Stranger Things—shows that felt like cultural events. Nowadays? Netflix has built something of a reputation for churning out mountains of forgettable slop, algorithm-friendly content that evaporates from memory almost as soon as the credits roll. Yet every so often, buried beneath all that quantity, something—if not exactly good, then at least interesting—manages to surface. One such curiosity is the 2022 miniseries Inventing Anna.
Netflix constructed much of its earlier prestige on the back of true crime documentaries, and Inventing Anna is, superficially at least, cut from similar cloth. It's a live-action drama based on a recent criminal case, adapted from Jessica Pressler's 2018 article in New York magazine. That piece chronicled the scandalous exploits of Anna Delvey, arguably the most brazen and certainly one of the most notorious con artists to operate in 2010s New York. Delvey—born Anna Vadimovna Sorokina in Moscow in 1991, daughter of a lorry driver—spent her teenage years as an immigrant in Germany. After failed attempts to break into fashion magazines, she arrived in New York in 2013, adopted her new name, and began constructing an elaborate persona as a wealthy German heiress. This fictitious identity gained her entry into Manhattan's most exclusive circles, where she befriended celebrities and bankrolled an increasingly lavish lifestyle through an escalating series of frauds. She defrauded banks, luxury hotels, and eventually her own friends, leading to her arrest in 2017 and conviction in 2019. Having served two years in prison, she was paroled and remains locked in legal battles against deportation to Germany.
The nine-part miniseries comes courtesy of Shonda Rhimes, the American television titan behind Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and Bridgerton, and frequently cited as one of the most influential figures in contemporary television. Her script follows Delvey's saga through the eyes of Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), a magazine reporter serving as a fictional stand-in for Pressler herself. Though her editors would prefer she cover the MeToo movement, Kent becomes obsessed with the Delvey scandal—partly to redeem herself from a previous professional humiliation when she was duped by a fabulist, partly because she's racing against the clock to file her story before the birth of her first child. She meets Delvey (Julia Garner) and begins piecing together her sordid tale of megalomaniacal deception and audacious fraud, culminating in a disastrous trip to an ultra-luxurious resort in Marrakesh.
Inventing Anna arrived with genuine potential. Here was a story perfectly positioned to interrogate thoroughly modern concerns: the performative nature of social media, the illusory quality of celebrity, and the obvious dysfunction of New York's elite. The series could have positioned Delvey as a sort of folk heroine—a working-class immigrant who managed to fleece the Masters of the Universe and expose their venality in the process. Yet the script cannot decide whether to pursue this angle or, as it does for most of its running time, portray Delvey as an unpleasant, fundamentally unsympathetic character.
Julia Garner certainly commits to the role, capturing Delvey's deliberately opaque Russo-German accent and her peculiar, performative public personality. Still, she never quite convinces as someone capable of schmoozing her way into high society. The series offers only one explanation for her success: her victims were even more shallow and less sympathetic than she was. This includes Vivian Kent herself. The result is a series lacking anyone worth rooting for, one that shuffles toward no proper conclusion whatsoever. Matters weren't helped when Rachel DeLoache Williams—Delvey's friend and a Vanity Fair editor played by Katie Lowes—publicly criticised her portrayal and launched lawsuits against the production, ultimately settled in 2026.
But the fundamental flaw here is excessive length. Nine episodes is simply too much real estate for this story, which could have been told with considerably more punch as a feature film. The narrative sags under the weight of unnecessary subplots and repetitive scenes that do little to illuminate the central mystery of Delvey's appeal.
Despite becoming one of Netflix's most-watched series at the time of release, and despite garnering numerous award nominations, Inventing Anna remains a project difficult to recommend. True crime enthusiasts might find enough here to sustain their interest, but everyone else would be better served looking elsewhere for their entertainment.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
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