Why investigative journalism is a goldmine for star-studded TV

Ask the cast of Inventing Anna how they first heard the story of Anna Sorokin the Russian scam artist who posed as a wealthy German socialite and swindled New York's elite and they'll usually give a similar answer.

"The first time I heard about this story was [through] The Cut article by Jessica Pressler," actor Julia Garner, who plays Sorokin, told CBC News. "And I reacted like how the whole world reacted about that article; I was like, 'Woah! This article's amazing.This story's amazing.'"

Inventing Anna, which premieres Friday on Netflix, is based on a May 2018article by journalist Jessica Pressler published in The Cut, the culture and lifestyle vertical of New York Magazine.Pressler's article quickly went viral, becoming the magazine's third most-engaged digital story of the entire year.

Just a month later, TV mogul Shonda Rhimes and her production company Shondaland had optioned it for a Netflix adaptation.

WATCH |The cast of Inventing Anna discuss the magazine-inspired miniseries:

The stars of Inventing Anna discuss the Netflix miniseries

3 years ago

Duration 2:01

Julia Garner, Anna Chlumsky, Arian Moayed and Alexis Floyd tell CBC News about the magazine article that inspired the Anna Sorokin saga and what her story says about our cultural climate.

"I remember the headlines," said Arian Moayed, who plays Sorokin's lawyer, Todd Spodek. "I remember, 'Soho grifter,' I remember 'fake German heiress'." Moayed read the series' script and Pressler's article before accepting the role.

And Laverne Cox, who plays Kacy Duke, a member of Sorokin's inner circle, said she knew a bit about Sorokin from a news report "and so I read the Jessica Pressler article and was like, 'Woah! What is this!' I just became literally obsessed and started reading everything I could get my hands on."

The show follows Sorokin (also known by her adopted last name, Delvey) from Paris Fashion Week to Ibiza, Spain,to Marrakech, Morocco,toNew York City'sRikers Island jail complex. Butit's told from the perspective of Vivian Kent, a fictionalized version of Presslerplayed byVeep star Anna Chlumsky.

Current saturation is a side effect of streaming

Hollywood is looking to journalists for their next big hit, as a recent slew of TV miniseries have been adapted from investigativemagazine articles and deep-dive podcasts. The movies have taken inspiration from reporters for decades but what's novel about the next phase of this trend?

"It's like a built-in story and a built-in audience," saidAnita Li, a Toronto-based journalism instructor, and the founder and editor-in-chief ofThe Other Wave, a journalism innovation newsletter about challenging the status quo in Canadian media. "So it makes complete sense that digital journalism, especially long-form, would be an [intellectual property] goldmine in Hollywood."

Good long-form journalism will have a narrative arc, characters that are heroes and villains, and a climactic build-up to keep the reader engaged. The resulting product lends itself to a miniseries, anthology series or television show, Li said.

"When we made a show like Dr. Death or Dirty John or The Shrink Next Door, we're thinking about how we're taking the listener through characters, through story, you know, binge-ability, all of those things," said Marshall Lewy, the chief content officer at Wondery, a podcast network with several shows that have been adapted for the screen. According to Lewy, the company has played a close role in all but one of its adaptations.

The upcoming TV miniseries WeCrashed was based on an eponymous Wondery series, a six-part saga by radio journalist David Brown. The story details the love affair at the center of WeWork, a darling of the 2010s startup world that lost the confidence of investors partly due to the behaviour of its CEO, Adam Neumann.

WATCH | The trailer for Apple TV+ series WeCrashed, starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway:

"[Founder] Hernan Lopez started the company with the idea of telling audio stories in a more sort of cinematic, gripping style," Lewy said.

Adapting journalism to the screen isn't quite new. Movies like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dog Day Afternoon, Almost Famous, Shattered Glass, and Into The Wild, to name only a handful, were all famously adapted from magazine articles. (It's not even new for Pressler: her 2015 article,"The Hustlers at Scores," was adapted into the 2019 film Hustlers starring Jennifer Lopez.)

But the current saturation is due to the rise of streaming, according to Li. In addition to Inventing Anna, which streams on Netflix, and WeCrashed, which will debut on Apple TV+, miniseries The Dropout, about convicted Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, will air on Hulu and star Amanda Seyfried.

And Gaslit, based on the Slate Magazine podcast Slow Burn, will air on the TV network Starz and stream across its platforms. Julia Roberts and Sean Penn lead the Watergate drama.

"The difference now is that people are consuming content at higher rates than we've ever seen before," Li said, explaining that streamers are trying to keep up with that demand by expediting new ideas.

Journalism, given the nature of news, operates at a similarly high pace.

"Even long-form pieces, they might take like, six months to a year to do, but that's still a relatively quick turnaround," she added. "It just kind of goes hand-in-hand with the way streamers function this really dovetails with the rise of streamers and the rise of audience consumption when it comes to entertainment and media."

Podcasts are an especially hot commodity

Major news organizations are jumping on the opportunity to develop their works for the screen.

"I had never done a podcast, a narrative-style podcast, but it felt from the early days like a format that would be really strong," said Rebecca Jarvis, the ABC News chief business, technology and economics correspondent. Jarvis is host of the Holmes-centered podcast The Dropout.

WATCH | The teaser for Huluseries The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried:

News site and podcast network Canadaland announced a deal last year with Storied Media Group, a U.S. intellectual property broker, to market and sell its multimedia journalism for film and TV adaptation. Its podcasts Thunder Bay and Cool Mules are being developed into scripted and non-scripted series, according to Variety Magazine.

And CBC announced in 2019 that it would make its foray into the podcast-to-TV pipeline, having signed a deal to adapt five of its original podcasts into scripted, unscripted and documentary series. The titles in development include Someone Knows Something, Uncover: The Village, Personal Best, Tai Asks Why, and Alone: A Love Story.

Jarvis envisioned the Holmes story as a podcast from the get-go, "and that was because I wanted to go deep," she said. "I wanted to be able to flesh out some of the nuance of the story and the intricacies and the story of Theranos."

The adapted miniseries will debut in March.

"I think what makes it really exciting is that people in the audience are going to see new things that they didn't see in the context of the podcast," Jarvis added.

Selling IP has plenty of upsides

Both Lewy and Li contend that certain liberties might be taken in a fictionalized adaptation "maybe it's not as respectful to the original sources, maybe it's very dramatized," Li said and that different versions of the same story might invite comparisons between the two, flattering one over the other.

But selling the intellectual property rights to a work of journalism has plenty of upsides, benefiting media institutions who want to amplify their work and broaden their audience and giving an opportunity for individual journalists to profit from their original reporting, according to Li.

"There are a lot more journalists who are becoming independent," she said. "There's a lot who are launching their own newsletters, their own podcasts, their own news outlets you're diversifying your own personal revenue streams or your personal income streams."

"Especially in an industry where there is so much precarious employment, if you want to get paid, I think it's awesome," she said.

"I think when you adapt anything from one medium to the next, especially as you're fictionalizing it, you're going to have to find a new way to tell that story," Lewy said. He noted that all of Wondery's podcasts undergo a fact-checking process and approval by a legal team.

"When you're making a fictionalized version of that, there's gonna be certain liberties taken, but I think a lot of the time it is nice that people will start saying, 'Hey, you should actually listen to the podcast, it was way better.' I think that's flattering to the reporter."