I liked the show well enough. I liked following the plot as Vivian uncovered it and put pieces together and returned to different interviews when she realized something had been left out. I liked that they put effort into not just the investigation but building the article and having to get witnesses to approve and consent.
And I also like the writing; there were actually some themes that had a subtle touch but were still forward enough.
I also really liked when she went to Germany and kept concocting deeper and more fantastic answers to why Anna was the way she was when it really was a lot simpler and more depressing than that. I like that it dealt with classism even in her origins.
I thought the ending was... It swerved into a different direction? Suddenly it felt like Vivian wanted Anna to get off and she went WAY beyond her journalistic role in the case and it felt... umprompted. Why? Why does she care? Why does she help? Why does she aid this vapid social media campaign?
And then the arguments in the final episode with the attorney felt... It felt like conflict for the sake of it? Dramatics? I didn't understand why they were arguing I guess.
It felt like... the show suddenly wanted me to sympathize with Anna at the end and I didn't feel like she earned it. She learned nothing. Am I supposed to feel bad her legal team betrayed her? I didn't.
Similarly, I thought Nef was a cool tragic character; a woman who got so wrapped up in the lies of one friend that she rejects all of her other friends. But... I don't know really if the show saw her as a tragic figure?
The show felt inconsistent in it's view and what I should be gleaning from it at times. One episode Anna is an unsympathetic vapid bitch, the next I should feel sorry for her, and then we're back to her being awful. I don't mind having complex characters who are awful but sympathetic, but that's a very tight line to walk and this ain't it.
Looked for a topic about this series or recent Netflix series in general but I didn't find one, so here we are.
Despite Shonda Rhimes being so popular, this is the first series of hers that I watched after an acquaintance told me about it (I'm more a film and cartoon kind of person), so I didn't really know what to expect. I watched the episodes in a few days and... I don't think it was really that good at all.
The episodes are overly long and bloated, and despite this, and being centered around a case of investigative journalism, I ended it feeling like I have learned nothing anyway. Maybe also because the two main leads are fairly unlikable: Vivian the journalist's entire characterization is "being pregnant" and "making silly faces", whereas the titular Anna is such an obnoxious haughty bitch that it's never clear what makes people so enamored with her as to put their entire careers in danger (yes, I know it's Truth in Television but it doesn't make it actual good television in my opinion). Maybe they should have given more space to the secondary characters that just seem to come and go most of the time.
Also it is not clear what the moral of the show is: on one hand it seems to be "it's good that rich powerful people get scammed because they don't deserve their fame and fortune", on the other Anna comes across as a delusional sociopath that not even her parents like anymore so... maybe it's just "some people are assholes and will never change so there's nothing you can do". Or maybe it's a critique of the "girlboss" attitude, since Anna complains about not being taken seriously because she's a young woman, but nobody bothers to verify her credentials anyway? I don't know. I'm not from the US so maybe some aspects of it are lost on me, but it doesn't seem to paint a good picture of their high society.
"Effective Altruism" is just another bunch of horsesh*t.