Inventing Anna: The Confidence to Send Someone Else the Bill
Anna Delvey has a remarkable gift for making a perfectly reasonable question sound like a social embarrassment. Where is the money? Why hasn't the transfer arrived? Ask her and suddenly you are the problem: provincial, impatient, too small-minded to understand how people at her level do business.
That is the pleasure of Inventing Anna. I enjoyed watching a roomful of supposedly sophisticated people get tied in knots by somebody who treats confidence as proof of funds. The clothes and hotels are fun, but the nerve is the real attraction. Julia Garner makes Anna exhausting company and very good television.
A story people wanted to believe
The starting point is a supposed German heiress making her way through wealthy New York circles. She has expensive tastes, big plans and a convincing explanation for why someone else needs to cover the immediate expense. Journalist Vivian Kent starts investigating how far that performance could take her.
Shonda Rhimes developed the series from Jessica Pressler's reporting. It is a dramatisation, not a documentary: conversations, characters and events have been shaped for television. That distinction matters here because the programme is so gleefully outrageous that “it really happened” would otherwise become an all-purpose excuse for anything it puts on screen.
The central idea needs no such excuse. Once people have decided somebody belongs, they are surprisingly willing to do the rest of the work for them.
That voice
Garner's accent is strange enough to make you stop and listen. So is the rhythm: an insult delivered with the casual certainty of somebody correcting a restaurant order. Anna doesn't need to win every argument on its merits. She needs the other person to feel that having the argument marks them out as an amateur.
I liked the way Garner holds that superior expression when the situation gives Anna very little reason for superiority. The performance makes her confidence feel like a habit she can no longer put down. A softer moment might be genuine; it might be another way of getting what she wants. Garner leaves enough uncertainty to keep her interesting.
It is a very different kind of forcefulness from Ruth in Ozark. Both characters can dominate a conversation, but Anna expects the world to apologise for inconveniencing her.
Someone has to ask the boring questions
Anna Chlumsky plays Vivian, whose pursuit of the story gives the series a second source of momentum. The interviews are often better than the extravagant social scenes because Anna has to deal with somebody who keeps coming back.
Vivian has ambitions and frustrations of her own. That helps: she isn't simply a device for explaining the plot to us. Chlumsky makes the eagerness to land the story visible, including the moments when professional curiosity starts to look rather like fascination.
There is also a limit to how much of Vivian's life I need alongside Anna's. The series sometimes wanders away from its most compelling subject for longer than I wanted. The reporting frame works best when the two women are testing each other.
The price of looking successful
The costumes earn their place in this story. Anna's appearance is part of the pitch; a hotel lobby or an expensive meal becomes somewhere to demonstrate that she already inhabits the life she is selling. The show understands the absurdity of people treating those surroundings as character references.
I found the smaller transactions especially revealing. Who offers to pay? Who is uncomfortable asking to be paid back? Who would rather absorb a loss than admit they misjudged somebody? That is where the glamour begins to look expensive in a much less appealing way.
The production lets us enjoy the surface while showing the work required to maintain it. It is easy to laugh at the people falling for Anna. It is more interesting to notice how often vanity is doing the persuading before she even opens her mouth.
Nine episodes is a generous allowance
My main reservation is the length. These are substantial episodes, and the same pattern can only repeat so often before the surprise starts wearing off. Another display of entitlement may be entertaining without telling us much we haven't already learned.
A tighter version would have made Anna's progress feel sharper. Some of the movement between glamorous comedy, personal drama and investigation is less smooth than it could be, too. I preferred the dryly ridiculous exchanges to the passages that strain to make every relationship equally absorbing.
None of that stopped me enjoying it. Garner supplies enough irritation, humour and sheer audacity to carry the slower stretches. I just don't think every detour improves the story.
Fascinating is not the same as admirable
Anna is an excellent subject for a drama without being somebody I need to cheer on. The series is most convincing when it lets her behaviour speak for itself. Her ambition can be impressive in scale while her treatment of the people around her is miserable.
That tension is worth keeping. A programme about a con becomes much less interesting if it falls completely in love with the con artist. Here, the inconvenience and expense tend to land on somebody else, however stylish the person causing them may look.
I came away more interested in the willingness of the surrounding world to be persuaded than in any grand explanation of Anna herself. She has a story ready for every occasion. The revealing part is who decides not to check it.
Worth putting on
Inventing Anna is an enjoyable, overlong account of an extraordinary performance of wealth. Garner is the reason to watch, and the combination of social comedy and investigative curiosity kept me interested even when the pacing could have used a firmer hand.
It is available on Netflix in the UK, checked 13 September 2026.
For another world where money and status make people behave very badly, try Billions. For a considerably darker use of Garner's talents, there is Ozark. Anna would probably have a withering opinion of both sets of people. She would still expect them to pick up the bill.
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