Some cons work because everyone around them wants to believe the story. Inventing Anna, the 2022 series created by Shonda Rhimes, builds its entire structure around that willingness, using one journalist's investigation to unpack how a young woman convinced New York's social elite she was someone she wasn't.
What is Inventing Anna about?
The series follows a reporter with a career on the line as she digs into the case of Anna, a German-born woman who became an Instagram-era fixture of New York's social scene by presenting herself as a wealthy heiress. Told partly through the journalist's present-day investigation and partly through flashback to Anna's rise, the show traces how borrowed hotel suites, expensive dinners and a circle of new friends built a reputation that outlasted any single lie, until the money behind it ran out. Julia Garner leads as Anna, with Anders Holm, Arian Moayed, Katie Lowes, Jeff Perry, Terry Kinney, Kate Burton and Laverne Cox filling out the reporters, lawyers and socialites pulled into her orbit.
About the cast
Julia Garner's performance as Anna sits at the center of the series, built around a persona that shifts depending on who Anna is talking to. Arian Moayed, Katie Lowes and Anders Holm appear as figures in her legal and journalistic orbit, while Jeff Perry, Terry Kinney and Kate Burton round out the newsroom pursuing her story, and Laverne Cox plays one of the few people in Anna's circle who never fully bought the act.
Context & significance
Created and largely written by Shonda Rhimes, Inventing Anna arrived in 2022 as one of the highest-profile scripted takes on a true story that had already circulated widely as magazine journalism and tabloid coverage. Running at roughly 67 minutes an episode across its season, the series treats the case less as a straightforward crime story and more as a study of how New York's social and media world extended trust to someone who asked for it convincingly enough.
Watching Inventing Anna on Ktime
Inventing Anna streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, giving Farsi-speaking viewers the option to follow the con and the newsroom chase either dubbed or with the original English performances subtitled. Watching only requires a free K-Time account login, and the show's page can be viewed without signing in first.