(Netflix, 2022). Produced by Shonda Rhimes. Reviewed by Paul Tankard

A few years ago, the miniseries was looking like it might save television. But that was before streaming. Once you’ve figured out that you can run your computer into the big screen in the corner, you soon learn that an increasing proportion of the best TV is not on TV.

Miniseries are basically very long movies. Unlike episode-based series of the past, they are not designed to go on season after season, with the same characters and scenario, but to tell long-form stories. The option to stream a whole series has given rise to the phenomenon of binge-watching.

The best of this genre that I’ve seen this year is the nine-part Netflix series, Inventing Anna. The true and recent story of New York celebrity and convicted fraudster Anna Delvey is designed less to attract people who are transfixed by celebrities than those of us who quietly rejoice when they become object lessons.

In the mid-2010s, aged around 22, Anna Delvey (Julia Garner) appeared in New York City, mixing with the conspicuously rich: people from the world of fashion and the fashionable end of art. But Inventing Anna begins with her in court: she’s on trial for fraud, but still stringing along her lawyer (Arian Moayed) and a determined journalist, Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), whose efforts to secure Anna’s story, to understand and write it, is the lynchpin of the narrative.

Delvey claims to be a German heiress, whose scheme is to establish in New York an exclusive club-cum-art gallery. To do so she raises hundreds of thousands in loans and lives lavishly on credit — mostly other people’s — in order to prove her claims and secure her funds.

That most of the people with whom she mixes are living on more-or-less unearned wealth and pass their time doing wasteful and fatuous things adds a piquancy to the story, which the film-makers recognise and exploit. There is the feeling that Anna is simply abiding by the observed rules of this set, and that an outsider ripping off these privileged wasters is more amusing than outrageous.

What in fact she would have done if she’d not been rumbled and convicted is not actually clear. Did she really intend to set up her club? The question is never asked.

Garner plays Anna as sharp-tongued and unpredictable, but also winsome and cute, like a small snappy handbag dog. The total effect is not so much mysterious as evasive, and Garner gives her a weirdly perfect and unplaceable accent, all of which characteristics distract anyone from insisting she answer difficult questions.

There is poignancy in Anna’s ability to attract and retain loyal, baffled friends. But Inventing Anna is upbeat, self-aware and much of the time rather comical, as indicated by the recurring tagline, that pops up in the scenery of each episode: “This story is completely true, except for the parts that are totally made up.” Does it matter which is which?

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 270 May 2022: 28