The surfaces shine, the dialogue is snappy, and the cast has pep. The villains have layers the heroes have weaknesses. The characters are rendered broadly but not cartoonishly. Inventing Anna features a lot of what Rhimes fans enjoy about her work.
Though Rhimes made her reputation with the hit medical melodrama Grey’s Anatomy, the most influential shows from her Shondaland production company have been the likes of Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder and Bridgerton: stories about the ways the powerful flex their privilege, and the ways they can be brought low by small-timers bearing grudges and guile. This is all prime material for a Shonda Rhimes project, too. It encompasses so many quintessentially New York themes: An immigrant reinventing herself in a land of opportunity the preoccupation with the projection of success over true substance and the sometimes destructive results of FOMO envy in a city where someone is always out-thriving someone else.
The Anna Delvey story could be Vivian’s last big shot. She’s also heavily pregnant, but ignores the advice of her friends and husband to take early maternity leave, because she’s determined to regain her lost prestige. She’s now hanging on by her fingernails at her old Manhattan job, stuck in a corner cubicle among the magazine’s unfashionable old-timers, where she half-heartedly chases whatever trendy story her editor assigns.
A former rising star, she made a glaring error in a buzzy article and subsequently saw a prestigious new gig evaporate. Inventing Anna begins with Vivian at a low professional ebb. That said, it is worth noting how the character has been fictionalized, because that speaks to what the storyteller thinks makes for a compelling protagonist - and why a journalist’s life might need tweaking to be more “dramatic.” (Pressler’s not really a public figure, so it’s possible she insisted on the change.) It’d be unfair to criticize Inventing Anna based on how closely or not Vivian resembles her real-life inspiration, because that clearly isn’t what Rhimes and her team set out to do. Movie and TV movie producers fiddle with the particulars of true stories all the time: for legal reasons, for poetic license, or because using the real person’s name and details might be intrusive. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this switch. While Vivian shares some biographical traits with Pressler - most notably the lingering sting of a big professional embarrassment - the name-change indicates that Vivian shouldn’t be seen as exactly the same person who wrote the New York story. But her character (played by Anna Chlumsky) has been renamed Vivian Kent, and the magazine she writes for is now Manhattan. The show is officially adapted from Pressler’s article and she’s one of its producers. The second major character in Inventing Anna is Pressler … but not entirely. She then became a minor celebrity after her story was told by the reporter Jessica Pressler in a lengthy 2018 New York Magazine profile. Born in Russia as Anna Sorokin, she spent time in Germany, London, and Paris before visiting New York and finding it strangely easy to slip into the social circles of the obscenely wealthy. The first is Anna Delvey (played by Julia Garner): a cunning and stubbornly mysterious con artist who a few years back duped several well-connected rich folks and multiple high-end New York City institutions into believing she was an aristocratic European heiress and fundraiser. There are two main characters in producer Shonda Rhimes’ new Netflix miniseries Inventing Anna, both based on real people.
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