The celebrity podcast reaches its nadir with The Anna Delvey show — review

Receive free Arts updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Arts news every morning.

Where to start with the calamity that is The Anna Delvey Show? This new podcast is beamed from its host’s Manhattan apartment where she is currently under house arrest. Delvey has never hosted a podcast before, though she has been the subject of one. That show, Fake Heiress, told of how the Russian-born Delvey (real name Anna Sorokin) conned New York high society into believing she was a multi-millionaire, ran up debts all over town and was subsequently jailed for crimes including theft and grand larceny (she was released in 2021 after serving four years). Delvey was also the subject of the Netflix series Inventing Anna as well as a book written by one of her victims.

But now Delvey gets to speak for herself in an interview series which promises “honest, unfiltered conversation that will question traditional notions of what is right and wrong”.

Her inaugural guest is the comic Whitney Cummings, who essentially delivers an hour-long comedy skit during which Delvey giggles hopelessly in the background. In the rare moments that she does speak, her questions include: has Cummings ever been arrested? What kind of men does she think Delvey should date? Does she think Delvey has been treated harshly because she is a woman? I don’t think I’ve ever heard a podcast host ask so many questions geared not towards finding out about her guest but towards getting them to talk about her.

Her next two interviewees — musician Julia Cumming and writer Brontez Purnell — fare a little better, inasmuch as Delvey asks a few questions that are actually about them. But there is no escaping her awkwardness and her singular lack of charisma and curiosity. As for the significance of the series artwork, which sees her reclining in bed in a bathrobe, clutching a yellow phone and staring impudently at the camera, your guess is as good as mine.

Listeners hoping a podcast would provide an opportunity for this most enigmatic and talked-about figure to tell her side of the story, or at least provide some juicy morsels about prison life, will be disappointed. The law prevents criminals from profiting from publicity about their crimes, which means that, aside from some weak jokes about her electronic ankle tag and whether prospective boyfriends might be spooked by her probation officer, Delvey keeps shtum.

The Anna Delvey Show is yet another example of the audio industry’s self-defeating obsession with hiring big-name hosts, often at vast expense, irrespective of whether they have the required skills (see also Archetypes, the now-defunct Spotify series ineptly helmed by the Duchess of Sussex). To be clear: Delvey does not have the skills. The whole exercise feels cynical, pointless and, in capitalising on its host’s fraudster status, pretty tasteless to boot. By now, we have surely reached the bottom of the celebrity podcast barrel. Please, no more.

audioboom.com