‘Inventing Anna’ and One Easy Trick

The art of the cliffhanger can be applied to any serialized story. It can also ruin them.

I don’t know much about anything, but I do know that Anna Chlumsky’s facial expressions are endlessly entertaining.

Streaming has changed how we fundamentally interact with television, and one of the main effects is a lowering of our collective standards¹. Not necessarily in a quality sense, but in a personal sense. Lord knows I have watched many things I would never have made time for if it aired in an old-school, appointment-viewing manner—one episode a week—solely because it had been lingering on streaming platforms for a long time and I got tired of clicking past it². Yes, it’s true: The kid who once moved heaven and earth in order to catch every episode of The Dukes of Hazzard or Buck Rogers in the 21st Century³ now can’t be bothered to watch things on corporate America’s schedule. I obviously got fancy⁴.

The fact remains that I would never have watched Inventing Anna if I’d been under any sort of pressure to watch it⁵. But having it just sit on my screen for weeks on end like moldering cheese combined with my very minimal curiosity about its subject broke me, and I watched it. And it’s fine. The story is well-nigh unbelievable, of course, despite being more or less true, but then we’re all much dumber than we think, and I know I have been reduced to a simpering asshole in the presence of money⁶, so who am I to doubt it’s veracity? And the few monied folks I have run into definitely act like actually paying for things and carrying money of some sort with them is somehow distasteful, so that tracks—I mean, Elon Musk is worth a trillion bucks and yet certainly seems disinclined to spend his own money on buying something like Twitter⁷. The richer you are, the more disconnected you are from the transactional stuff.

And Inventing Anna is put together with some dash. Anna Chlumsky is always reliably brilliant, and Julia Garner is terrific, and the show zips along for the most part. Does it succumb to the disease of Algorhithmically-Dictated Series Length? Yeah, there’s some filler in there, no doubt. But there’s some fun editing and they put some effort into bringing a bit of mystery to a story that’s been reported to death.

And they do one thing consistently throughout the series that I found interesting: They end just about every episode on a cliffhanger.

Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel

How do I know I’ll never be a true Rich Person? Because I think champagne tastes like ass.

This is an old trick, and one I’ve used myself many times. My second novel, The Electric Church, was originally written as a serial where each chapter ended on a story beat—if not precisely always a cliffhanger, at least a sudden upturn of energy. It’s a powerful technique when you pull it off⁸, especially if you’re dealing with a story that lacks a certain element of mystery or surprise. Most of us are more or less generally aware of the Anna Delvy story, at least on a superficial level—so treating normal story beats like shocking cliffhangers is a smart way to keep your audience from wandering off like the morons in a hurry we often are⁹.

The downside to this trick is, of course, the inevitable disappointment when the cliffhanger is paid off in the next chapter/episode. Cliffhangers are actually kind of easy to introduce—all you do is have someone rush into the room and say something ominous, like so:

KIRBY rushes into the room. “Everyone! Run and hide!”

EVERYONE: Why?

KIRBY, waiting a beat to look around. “Because ... they’re here.”

<SMASH to credits>

See? Instant energy. The reader is champing at the bit to find out what incredible thing is about to happen! And yet I have no idea, because I just made up that example from whole cloth. That’s the double-edged sword of cliffhanger chapter endings. They’re easy, but they can also backfire easily if you can’t come up with something exciting behind them¹⁰.

Inventing Anna was mediocre in this regard. A lot of those cliffhangers turned out to be not quite as shocking or interesting as you might initially think. In part, this was due to the sad confines of reality—the writers weren’t totally free to invent, augment, or fictionalize things too broadly. So when they teased something at the end of one episode in order to goad you into leaping directly into the next one, it was more often than not a bit of a letdown.

And that constant letdown slowly erodes your audience’s enjoyment. It’s like being given an amuse bouche at a fancy restaurant only to discover it tastes like stale bread and ketchup¹¹: You might not storm out of the place in a fury, but your expectations for the dinner to come are definitely lower. In other words, with great power comes great responsibility—you have the power to introduce cliffhangers to your chapter stops, but make sure you can do something with them before you do so.

The Algo

Julia Garner’s ability to look disappointed no matter what she’s doing in this role is acting genius.

Of course, when it comes to television, as gestured at above part of the problem here is the algorithm, which rules all¹². Cliffhangers have always been used to hold viewer/reader interest until the next installment, but prior to the Streaming Era that typically meant at least a short wait—a week until the next episode, a few years until the sequel film or the next book in a series. These days, with the binge model of viewing it’s a little different—the cliffhanger is used to lure you into watching the next episode immediately.

In the old model, that delay would often soften the blow of a disappointing cliffhanger payoff—if you tuned in excitedly to find out what had been teased, you might still feel that deflated sense of ho-hummery, but that delay made it go down a little easier because it meant your initial excitement would have faded somewhat. Today, that disappointment is harsh and sharp, because you’re excited about the cliffhanger and five seconds later you’re experiencing the payoff to that cliffhanger. And if that payoff leaves your viewer with a sour taste in your mouth, that’s going to affect their entire experience with your show.

Of course, it could be argued that the cliffhangers in Inventing Anna are a literary device meant to mimic the real-life cliffhangers everyone experienced when running Anna Delvy’s credit cards, which was apparently a very, very Heisenbergian experience¹³. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to practice my vaguely Eurotrash accent.

Next week: Nothing more foolish than a man chasin' his hat.

1. Which basically means I no longer have any standards at all. Because they were so low to begin with, if I wasn’t being clear. I once ate a ketchup sandwich rather than leave my apartment, that’s how low my standards are.

2. I mean, I’m an older gentleman now. Who wants to gamble that I’ll be alive 5 years from now? Not me. I’ll take my episodes now, please. All of them.

3. Biddi biddi biddi. IYKYK.

4. But not too fancy. I still eat my Fritos an entire bag at a time, like everyone else.

5. I generally apply the Groucho Marx Rule to TV shows: The more they want me to be a part of the club, the more dubious I am about the benefits of belonging.

6. Watch for my memoir, now titled “A SIMPERING ASSHOLE IN THE PRESENCE OF MONEY.” True story.

7. Yet when I demand people loan me money so I can buy drinks at the bar, somehow I’m the asshole.

8. If I do say so myself.

9. "Keeping your audience from wandering off” is harder than it looks. For example, most of the people who started reading this newsletter wandered off five minutes ago and now we can start making fun of them.

10. It’s like when someone invites me to make a presentation at a writer’s conference: It’s real easy to say you’re going to talk about character development for an hour, and then much harder to actually create that presentation. So to sum up, that’s why I’m learning to break dance.

11. I seem to have some unexplored psychological damage connected to ketchup and bread. It may have something to do with the fact that I learned about ketchup sandwiches from my brother, Yan, who ate them constantly as a kid, proving he was not only not related to me but also possibly (probably) an alien of some sort. The recipe is simple if you want to be horrified: Two slices of Wonder bread, a schmear of kethup, salt. Your regrets are your own.

12. Except this newsletter! Which remains staunchly non-optimized, which is also why I have about 15 readers.

13. I can’t be the only person who daydreams about being a grifter like Anna and just living in fancy hotels without ever actually paying the bills. My problem is my genetic line is filled with grifters, so I have a very griftery look about me, which attracts hotel security the moment I walk in. It’s a problem.