I remember first hearing about the Anna Delvey story a being so intrigued by how she could scam New York’s social elite and WHOLE banks into almost giving her millions, but I never took an interest further. Shonda Rhimes is a woman who does miss an oppurunity to take a story, nay a scandal like this and NOT turn it into a TV show… but unfortunately this time she really missed the mark.
THE CAST AND THE ACCENT
While the titular character is Anna, we focus a lot more on the fictional journality Vivian based of of Jessica Pressler played by my girl Anna Chlumsky and Anna Delvey/Sorkin/Sorokina is played by Julie Garner and boy oh boy do I HATE THE ACCENT SHE USES. I get it, she is Russian born but lived in Germany and then wants to fit in in the U.S. but the accent is just so off-putting it genuinely made people turn off the entire show (which is still Number one in a lot of countries including South Africa). The rest of the cast is pretty much just big Shondaland reunion, literally we had Meredith Grey’s parents in one show, it was eerie, you could play a shondaland bingo for them. Besides for the two leads, everyone was satisfactory and of course unreasonably good looking, so again satisfactory by cable TV standards, which is what this felt like.
THE PLOT
When real life stories turn into somewhat fictional stories, the power and actual story gets very diluted for the sake of drama, and this is definetey what happened here. The focus on the mundane everyday life of the Journalist and the back and forth timeline were jarring and overall ruined my general viewing experince, appreciation for the retribution of the dumb socialite or the plights of her victims, who were all astoningshly just rich and grasping for attention thereby, hard to feel sorry for. There is also a huge focus on how young she is and her immigrant background under the Trump regime, but this too falls on my deaf ears as an Indian Muslim South African, I do not think her struggles as a white, European, blonde women will ever come close to the lives of latinx, arab and african immigrants and more so African Americans who would never even come close to acheiveing her level of scammery or access to that kind of credit. However, I will note that I did enjoy all the badass lawyering scenes.
EMPHASIS ON FASHUN
Another element of the inrtigue for me was the designer fashion that Anna paraded around in, but I am again perplexed by how the real Anna dresses, and honestly the show made it seem a lot better. Even the supposedly iconic styled court room looks were just “eh”. She was 25 and dressed like a women in her late thirties or a 16 year old, there is no in between. I am also just going to confirm, that yes, the girl definetely needed a good deep conditioner, but I do suppose real rich people do not dress like “new money”
https://www.instagram.com/annadelveycourtlooks/
So overall, I reccommend it as a good background watch but it was not a groundreaking hit series. It took a fascinating story and made it boring, and faaar too long. This type of story deserved the Tinder Swindler treatment which was far more enterianing or at the very least a solid 2 hour movie. Watch it, don’t watch it, honestly it is up to you, but I would give this Shondaland production a miss.
Caffeinated & Opinionated 