In Inventing Anna, reporter Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky) becomes entangled with Anna Delvey (Julia Garner), a scammer on trial for bilking millions from New York’s elite.

The show is inspired by the New York magazine piece “How an Aspiring ‘It’ Girl Tricked New York’s Party People — and Its Banks” by Jessica Pressler, who also serves as a producer on the series.

Chlumsky’s character is based on Pressler, and the fictional Manhattan magazine where she works is a stand-in for New York magazine.

Led by Henry Dunn, the Inventing Anna production design team not only drew inspiration from the real New York newsroom but also Anna’s story itself. 

“We're telling this seduction story,” Dunn tells Tudum. “Basically, it's a con job, but it's a con through seduction — [Anna] was selling herself.”

To have that tonally translate throughout the series, the creative team sought to “distill the visual essence” of the sleek office into the show’s set.

Part of that included taking New York’s signature single red wall and coating the Manhattan newsroom in swaths of the bold color. 

“We took that seductive thing – there is a red wall as you get off the elevator that says ‘New York magazine,’ but the rest of the interior is all white, with some black on white graphics inside of it [in the real location],” Dunn says. “But we thought that red was such a great statement. Let's bring it in, let's put it in as many places as we can and sell the sexy side of chasing a story.” 

The group did their research, photographing “the dickens” out of the real office. And since it was a recreation instead of an exact replica, the layout “was greatly determined by where we were able to get the real estate to build this office,” Dunn explains. “We didn't want to shoehorn the look of New York magazine to wherever we went; we wanted to take the building where we would end up and then use that to determine what we were going to do.”

They found their perfect location in Midtown Manhattan and got to work on assembling the Manhattan newsroom. “[It] took months to dress that set,” Dunn says. “If you sat at any desk, in that whole place — and there were 50, 60 desks — you would have known whether that [person] was a food writer or it was a style writer or politics [writer]... and whether they'd been there long, if they had personal or kid photographs.”

To make the newsroom pop, “there were little touches” added to make it feel lived-in. “Every single spot there was layered and taken care of,” Dunn enthuses. “There [were] reminder notes and to-do [lists]. It wasn't just ‘World's Greatest Golfer’ mug type of things that you see in the background of a quicker set dressing moment.”

And while an office might not be the most glamorous set the team had to work with, it had its own allure, Dunn says. “We wanted to get the romance of reporting in there.”

Inventing Anna is currently streaming on Netflix.

Additional reporting by Lawrence Yee.