As a true crime nerd, I have been fascinated with the story of Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, ever since the first accounts of her scams started to appear online. I have lost track of the number of resources I went through — podcasts, videos, articles — gobbling down the same story over and over again, as if trying to wear out its absurdity to make it more believable. Alas, Sorokin’s escapades never failed to strike me with a mixture of awe and distaste. This woman managed to lodge in luxury hotels for months without paying while tipping the hotel staff in one-hundred-dollar bills, stole a private jet to meet Warren Buffet, and almost received a multi-million-dollar loan for leasing a building at the heart of Manhattan. With nothing but blinding confidence and a massive ego to her name, Anna Sorokin, a twenty-something daughter of a Russian truck driver, built the persona of a German heiress with a huge trust fund — and New York’s financial and cultural elite bought into it in no time. Sorokin’s story, told by the news outlets, reveals the ugly face of privilege, class, and the myth of social mobility, but it leaves one wondering about the real face of Anna Sorokin herself. What was on Anna’s mind when she pulled her schemes? What kind of life makes a person like Sorokin? Who is Anna Sorokin after all?

Given my unquenchable curiosity about Sorokin’s character, I was excited to hear that Netflix was planning to produce an adaptation of her journey in a nine-episode series titled Inventing Anna. The show is largely based on a viral piece on Sorokin published in New York Magazine in 2018. As such, there are two storylines to the series’ narrative: one follows fictional journalist Vivian Kent writing the aforementioned article and talking to people affected by Sorokin, while the other consists of a sequence of flashbacks showing events from Sorokin’s past.

In retrospect, I can see why the creators of the show thought it was a good idea to tell the story in this way. In the constant effort of maintaining the image she created, Anna kept people at arm’s length, so exploring her personality through Kent’s eyes could help a viewer understand what it felt like to be in her vicinity. Additionally, given her narcissistic tendencies and the scale of her delusion, Anna as the protagonist would create an unreliable narrator for the series. Nonetheless, the poor execution of this plot device did no justice to the otherwise captivating story, and watching the series left me with a bitter aftertaste of a lost opportunity. In the opening line of the first episode, Anna Sorokin’s character makes a point that the story the viewer is about to watch “like a big lump of nothing” is all about her. In reality, it is about anything but. For a show about a con artist, an embarrassingly small amount of time is spent on the actual con. Instead, the viewer is forced to get into the redundant details about other characters, such as Sorokin’s friends or her lawyer, to the point where it is not clear what the show is trying to convey. 

Moreover, Inventing Anna really struggles to convince its viewer that Kent’s storyline was worth their time. The character’s negligence towards her husband and child and borderline unethical behavior makes her hard to empathize with, and the actress’s excessive facial expressions certainly do not help with her character’s likability. The only time I found myself sympathizing with Kent was in Episode 5, where the audience got to learn more about her past failure at work. Perhaps her plotline could have been improved by introducing her past or showing her struggle earlier, but poor writing throughout the show ensured that the character remains unpleasant. Worst of all, the show fails to present Anna Delvey as the magnetic character that she was in real life. As much as I loved Julia Garner’s performance in Ozark, and despite Garner’s spot-on physical transformation, her portrayal of Delvey does not quite capture the character’s allure that helped her integrate into New York’s high society. Despite the frustration with the main characters, I was charmed by Alexis Floyd as Delvey’s closest friend Neff and Laverne Cox as her personal trainer Kacy; their excellent acting kept me going throughout the show. 

Overall, the show is not as satisfying as it had the potential to be. It neither brings anything new to the table nor goes deeper into Sorokin’s motivations. It lacks the fun and excitement that one would expect to see in a show about a fraudster; the writing is poor, and political references that were shoved into every episode are dated.