Why Grifter Dramas Like ‘Inventing Anna’ And ‘The Dropout’ Are All The Rage

As expected, Netflix’s Inventing Anna skyrocketed in its second frame/first full week of availability (from February 14 to February 22). The Shonda Rhimes-created dramedy, chronicling a con artist who defrauded some of New York’s richest and most prestigious movers and shakers by pretending to be a wealthy German heiress, nabbed a whopping 3.3 billion minutes from nine episodes running around 603 minutes. Those exceptionally long episodes, even by streaming television standards, certainly played a role in a ratings system charted by minutes or hours viewed, but the show nearly tripled its debut figures (around 1.219 billion minutes). Netflix’s own internal data states that the show has earned 511 million hours globally, ranking fourth among all English-language television shows (for the first 28 days) behind only The Witcher season 1 (541 million hours), Stranger Things season 3 (582 million hours and Bridgerton season 1 (626 million hours).

Whether Inventing Anna, starring Julia Garner and Ann Chlumsky, can reach third place, Shonda Rhimes has two of the top four most-viewed seasons of English-language television and two out of seven among all Netflix shows counting All of Us Are Dead, Money Heist part 4 and Squid Game. The second season of Bridgerton, launching on March 25, should make a play for the record books as well. This should give Rhimes three of the top five English-language seasons on Netflix television. Among all of the various television super-producers (Ryan Murphy, Kenya Barris, etc.) who got mega-bucks Netflix deals, I’d argue Rhimes is the only one pulling their respective weight. All due respect to their successes elsewhere, I don’t see The Politician or BlackAF in the top ten. Oh, and of the slew of “real-life grifters dramatized” miniseries, we know folks are watching the hell out of Inventing Anna.

As for why we’ve seen a bunch of shows like this, it’s arguably a prestige television version of “IP” and/or “star+marquee character salesmanship. Theoretically, Amanda Seyfried *as* Elizabeth Holmes in Elizabeth Meriwether’s Hulu miniseries The Dropout (admittedly the best of these in a walk) is a loose variation on Angelinia Jolie *is* Maleficent! Ditto Lily James and Sebastan Stan *as* Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee, Joseph Gordon Levitt *as* the Uber co-founder and Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway *as* the husband/wife duo behind WeWork. The real-life scandal gives these shows a whiff of prestige beyond a YA fantasy-lit series or a comic book, and the notion of reexamining these infamous women with a potentially more sympathetic gaze (see also: American Crime Story: The People Vs. O.J. Simpson’s reevaluation of Marcia Clark) gives them the presumption of social good. The Framing Britany Spears documentary may have created a new sub-genre.

In a world where movies are now mostly fantasy franchises, year-end Oscar contenders or low-budget indies, these shows also give movie stars of all shapes and sizes a way to bite into juicy character roles. Fair or not, these miniseries are taking the place of the mid-budget theatrical feature, as many of these shows could have been better served via a 135-minute movie. Impeachment, starring Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky and Clive Owen as Bill Clinton, is an acting treat, but it’s no more “educational” than the respective You’re Wrong About That podcast episodes*. Moreover, there is a grim irony that the streaming wars have created a prestige sub-genre out of something that 30 years ago would have been a Sunday night network television movie of the week. I’m old enough to remember when every network had their own Amy Fisher/Long Island Lolita flick.

Since viewership/ratings info is hard to come by, we don’t know to what extent anyone cares about these shows outside of the media/entertainment nerd bubble. Are the likes of Pam & Tommy and Impeachment, with their voyeuristic thrills and retroactive “What went wrong?” moralizing, more blogged about than actually watched? I can only speculate, but the closest thing we’ve had to seeing one of these turned into an actual movie was Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci. With $152 million worldwide, the Lady Gaga-starring crime dramedy is the closest thing we’ve had to an adult-skewing theatrical hit in 2.5 years. Ditto, kinda-sorta, for Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye which didn’t rock the box office ($2.7 million) but might win Jessica Chastain her first Oscar. We’ll see if this mini-surge is as much of a momentary fad as the real-life disasters they chronicle.