There’s a lot of ambiguity in Inventing Anna. Not knowing what it wants to say is one of many flaws in Netflix’s adaptation of the Anna Delvey story™, which tells the scandalous tale of Anna Sorokin, an apple-cheeked twentysomething born on the outskirts of Moscow who posed as a German heiress to scam her way into New York City’s elite. Yet while the show is unsure of where it stands on Anna Delvey; on capitalism; on the state of new media, one thing is for certain: Inventing Anna really, really wants us to hate Rachel DeLoache Williams, journalist and ex-friend of Sorokin.
The hit nine-part show tells Anna’s story through Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), a fictional stand-in for Jessica Pressler, a real-life reporter who penned the revelatory New York Magazine exposé on which the series is based. Rachel DeLoache Williams is the other journalist embroiled in Anna Sorokin’s mess. Williams features as a character in Inventing Anna, a show which seems hellbent on making her out to be the worst person in the world. Maybe it’s because the Netflix series needs a villain. Maybe it’s because Williams sold her rights to HBO.
