Stealing a little over a quarter million dollars, conning your friends and fancy hotels does not make you a criminal, it makes you a smart business driven person. At least according to Netflix’s new show “Inventing Anna.” 

Released Feb. 11, “Inventing Anna” stars Julia Garner (Anna Delvey) and Anna Chlumsky (Vivian Kent). The show tells the story of Anna Sorokin, a con artist who went with the alias Anna Delvey, who pretended to be a German heiress with a trust fund and conned her way into high profile hotels and the lives of many people, especially their wallets. The story is told through the eyes of a made-up journalist who was trying to figure out and tell Delvey’s story by reaching out to the people and places she conned.

Although the goal is to tell the story of Sorokin, the show mainly focuses on the life and writing of the fictional journalist, Kent, who was inspired by the real journalist, Jessica Pressler, of the Delvey story. The show depicts moments of Kent’s struggle with her career due to her past and how her work ambition gets in the way of her personal life. 

Between the real-life inspiration, real story, and flashbacks between Delvey’s trial and what led to it, it is hard to decipher the facts from the fiction in the show. This creates a lot of confusion and distraction from the real life story and what really happened. 

While “Inventing Anna” still covers some of the real story, the story painted in the show leaves viewers thinking Delvey was some sort of business savvy entrepreneur. It sheds more light on her relationships with friends and her work towards her business, the Anna Delvey Foundation, rather than really showing what she did. 

The show portrays a strong relationship between Kent and Delvey, and shows Kent working to write a story to tell Delvey’s side of it all and let everyone know she is just like every other person working towards her dream. It focuses more on her working towards the American dream rather than showing that her way of working towards it was by conning and using people and business to get $275,000 to make her dream come true. 

However, the show portrayed a good message: people have become followers and seek out people they benefit from socially or financially. The show dedicated every episode to one person who knew and was conned by Delvey and in that episode would tell their story of what had happened. When it got to Delvey’s lawyers story it showed the trial where her lawyer, Todd Spodek, made a good argument about how people befriended Delvey and in most moments, even when there was signs they were being conned, still hung out and partied with her, because in the end they benefited from their association with her. Which through their actions shows they ignored the signs and remained followers of Delvey just because their friendship benefited their careers and social life. 

Despite having one good theme, “Inventing Anna” could not be saved. Between the confusion between facts and fiction and the focus on the good aspects of Delvey’s actions, the show did not really show the full story of the woman who conned New York socialites and businessmen out of a quarter million dollars. Save your time so you do not get conned into watching “Inventing Anna.”