Inventing Anna

 It's like they chickened out. You're supposed to feel that everyone Anna encounters finds her just so appealing, yet they make her a huge bitch in the last episode. Treat them mean, keep them keen might be a thing with boyfriends but it isn't really how people work. If you treat them mean, they usually just fuck you off.

Until then she had some vulnerability and while that didn't really make her likeable, at least you could penetrate to a child, perhaps damaged in some way (although they robbed her of that motivation by making her dad so ordinary).

Rachel will be upset when she sees it. They made her look and seem horrible. And yeah dropping the dime was vile but she was hurt. That was real. I mean, I have an aversion to snitching but I feel like you could really understand why she snitched. We all do things that we might regret when we're hurting.

Anyway, it was all a bit slow and aimless. I don't think Shonda Rhimes is a genius in any other respect than tapping into housewives' hearts. Well, maybe that is genius. But she's not particularly artful or at least the people she hires aren't. She makes soaps and clothes them, a bit thinly, in stories. This one was a four-episode show that found itself dragged painfully out for nine. What would have made it much better was a few jokes. It should have been a satire, with some sharp humour to power it through the nine years, sorry, hours, it played for.

But it wasn't. Amazingly, despite the possibility for lots of laughs, and the possibility to position Anna as a Becky Sharp-style clever bitch, it wasn't in the least bit funny. Even the bits that were funny weren't funny, if you know what I mean.

In the end I was watching it begrudgingly. I could just as well have turned it off in episode five and not even worried about it. FWIW, the two leads did their best with a weak script, although it's just a bit hard to see why men would faint with lust for Julia Garner, the way she played it. And you can't help feeling that Anna Chlumsky would have done some humour with relish. What she was given just wasn't very funny, even when it was meant to be. 

5/10 maybe? C+? Something like that. 

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:57 am