(Warning: Spoilers ahead!)
Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia has always been a lot of show—usually, too much.
On its face, a dramedy about the lives of a young mother (Brianne Howey as Georgia) and her teenage daughter (Antonia Gentry as Ginny) in a tight-knit New England town is quintessential Gilmore Girls (in Season 1, Georgia explicitly likens the two of them to Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, only “with bigger boobs”).
The tone of Ginny & Georgia’s teen storylines careen between the likes of Dawson’s Creek, Euphoria, and an after-school special, even as the show has thankfully made some progress in handling topics like self-harm and depression. Then there’s Georgia, whose own plot has grown into a soapy suburban crime drama that rivals the likes of Desperate Housewives and How To Get Away With Murder.
Georgia’s checkered past comes to the fore in Ginny & Georgia Season 3, which launches June 5 and picks up right where the last season left off: with Georgia, who just married town mayor Paul (Scott Porter), getting arrested for the murder of her town rival Cynthia’s (Sabrina Grdevich) terminally ill husband Tom (Vincent Legault).
To make matters worse, Georgia doesn’t know that her young son Austin (Diesel La Torraca) saw her smothering Tom to death with a pillow after Cynthia opened up about how hard it was watching her husband hold on.
Season 3 largely centers on the shifting alliances Georgia grasps for amid her highly-publicized murder trial. Since being one half of the series’ eponymous duo gives our matriarch iron-clad plot armor against a major prison sentence, following these proceedings carries all the narrative tension of watching paint dry. Having a more tightly defined story should make for a refreshing change of pace, but, despite glimmers of promise in the show’s YA side, it remains woefully overstuffed.
Admittedly, poor Tom — who was comatose for the entirety of his screen time—doesn’t make for the most compelling murder victim. What is interesting is the fact that Georgia’s two previous husbands turned up dead.
Thanks to a deluge of flashbacks, we know that she married and accidentally murdered her first husband, crooked landlord Anthony, with a lethal overdose intended to knock him out, and poisoned her second husband, Kenny, after she saw him making inappropriate advances toward Ginny. Naturally, the prosecution is happy to run with it, going so far as to accuse Georgia of being a serial killer.
Much like the recent final season of another Netflix show, You, this season of Ginny & Georgia gestures at satirizing the true crime fever that the streamer has ironically helped fuel. Deemed the “Mayoress Murderess,” she quickly becomes a darling of TikTok sleuths and TV talking heads alike in an impressive rotation of bright Rent the Runway-ready formal wear. Confined to the house with a clunky ankle monitor that the writers try their darndest to mine for comedic effect, Georgia’s dreams of finally starting fresh in her family’s new plush Boston suburb are further dashed when her two baby daddies yank their kids out of her house.
Austin’s no-good dad Gil (Aaron Ashmore) merely wants revenge against Georgia for getting him sent to jail on embezzlement charges after he became abusive. He manages to get Ginny’s well-meaning dad Zion (Nathan Mitchell) on his side after Anthony’s death comes to light, but leaves Ginny terrified for her little brother’s safety in the process.
That this review has gone on for so long without touching on Ginny’s side of the story only speaks to how bloated Ginny & Georgia has become—switching rapidly from lighthearted banter to tear streaked custody battles with such little fanfare, it often feels like the show has been generated by an AI algorithm that’s short-circuiting.
As you can imagine, the epic highs and lows of Ginny’s high school experience are pretty damn low now that a new viral headline about her mom’s murder trial pops up daily. Her on-again, off-again love interest Marcus (Felix Mallard) has taken a step back while dealing with his mental health, and her “MANG” friend group is underbaked as ever, their scenes largely confined to broad Gen Z aphorisms and trendy TikTok-famous tracks.
While Season 2 introduced a Black support system for Ginny courtesy of her father, her therapist (Zarrin Darnell-Martin), and her new friend Bracia (Tameka Griffiths), that element of her storyline is largely swept aside in favor of Georgia’s legal drama.
One bright spot in Ginny’s adolescent hell is the poetry course her dad signed her up for, where she strikes up a flirtation with dorky fellow student Wolfe (Ty Doran). He’s a welcome distraction from the heaviness of her predicament that Ginny desperately craves, until she discovers that a party hookup atop a friend of a friend’s dryer leaves her pregnant.
It’s the kind of soapy twist that defies logic and science—she was on birth control and took the test, like, three days later!—but the whole ordeal does prompt Ginny to break the custody rules and run back home to her mom, giving Howey and Gentry an all-too-rare chance to sell their characters’ mother-daughter bond.
In a moment where many Americans’ reproductive healthcare access is in serious jeopardy, the matter-of-fact manner in which Ginny & Georgia presents Ginny’s decision to have a medication abortion is a welcome one. Does Georgia follow up some exemplary parenting with the ridiculous decision to use Ginny’s positive pregnancy test to fake a pregnancy in hopes of winning back Paul’s support? Yes, but you should know what kind of show this is by now!
When that move fails, Ginny takes matters into her own hands— because what kind of a mother-daughter show would this be if it didn’t culminate in characters spitting, “You’re just like your mother”!? She manages to recruit Zion’s girlfriend Simone (Vinessa Antoine) as Georgia’s lawyer after Paul’s fancy legal counsel bails.
And if you were wondering why the series hasn’t finally made Austin relevant to the plot after teeing him up in Season 2, don’t worry! Ginny convinces him to lie on the stand and proclaim that he actually saw Gil murder Tom, which magically convinces the jury to find Georgia innocent.
She might be a serial killer, but peace is restored! That is, until Ginny catches Georgia chugging milk, which she’s said she only does when she’s pregnant. With Ginny & Georgia already greenlit for Season 4, the sky is truly the limit when it comes to just how unwieldy these characters’ storylines could become. I vote for a multiverse plot!
