‘Ginny & Georgia’ Will Make You Completely Rethink ‘Gilmore Girls’

Netflix’s new show Ginny & Georgia follows a beautiful young single mom and her precocious teen daughter as they wreck havoc on a small New England hamlet. If that set up — along with its flannel-wearing restaurant owner, endless pop culture quips, and double-G title — makes you immediately think of Gilmore Girls, you’re not alone. Ever since Netflix announced the show from first-time creator Sarah Lampert and showrunner Debra J. Fisher, TV fans have been quick to make the connection. However, if you give the devilishly fun Ginny & Georgia a chance, you’ll find a much more campy, far more progressive, and endlessly rebellious series.

Ginny & Georgia flips the script on Gilmore Girls‘s picture perfect look at life and examines the layers of privilege that pits people against each other. Brianne Howey stars as Georgia Miller, a 30-year-old Southern bombshell who will do literally anything to protect her two children. 23-year-old Antonia Gentry plays Georgia’s 15-year-old daughter Ginny, smart and cynical beyond her years. Together the mother and daughter make something of an odd couple, bound by a ferocious love and shared lust for advancement.

In Gilmore Girls, Lorelei (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel) had the wealth of Lorelei’s blue blood family to lean on, but Ginny and Georgia have nothing but their wits. Because of this, Ginny & Georgia swiftly becomes a darker, deeper look at the challenges non-privileged people face, and it’s far more riotously soapy show than Gilmore Girls at that.

“First and foremost, we love Gilmore Girls, it’s incredibly flattering to get to be compared to them,” Ginny & Georgia star Brianne Howey told Decider. “But I think audiences will find pretty quickly [Ginny & Georgia‘s] edgier, it’s darker, the tone is different. Tonally, we mix it up a lot, the messaging is different.”

Part of that messaging is diversity. The world of Gilmore Girls was overwhelmingly white, affluent, and straight. Ginny & Georgia follows a biracial protagonist, her lesbian best friend, and deeply impoverished people navigating life in a contemporary suburban town.

“And there are a lot of potentially taboo or uncomfortable subjects that we’re hoping to de-stigmatize and normalize when it comes to sexuality, race, privilege. We’re hoping that the young adult audience is able to really recognize and see themselves in it,” Howey said.

Ginny & Georgia splits its perspective between mother and daughter. Georgia’s point of view is that of a ruthless survivor. Born and raised in a Southern trailer park, Georgia has adopted numerous false identities to escape abuse, poverty, and worse. There’s a fascinating gulf between the charming mask she wears in society and the painful past she carries.

“I think Georgia plays every card that she’s been dealt, she’s not afraid. She’s not afraid of it. She doesn’t steer away from it, she leans into it. And I love that about her. She knows herself. She is bold, she’s confident, she’s calculated, she can be diabolical at times, she doesn’t follow any of the rules, and her main passion in life are her children and protecting them,” Howey said, noting that Georgia leans on not only her beauty, but also her Southern charm.

“It’s her accent, it’s her smile,” Howey said. “She totally weaponizes it and uses it to her advantage.”

Georgia might have no trouble winning friends and influencing people, but her daughter Ginny struggles in that area. When the family attempts to settle in Wellsbury, Ginny encounters her first brush with popularity. The usually withdrawn, introspective girl finds a best friend in the extroverted Maxine (Sara Waisglass) and an admirer in Max’s brooding twin brother Marcus (Felix Mallard). As much as she likes having a tight group of friends, the first season of Ginny & Georgia explores Ginny’s own battle to figure out where she, the biracial daughter of a white teen mom, fits in.

“She hasn’t had many friends before. She’s used to being overlooked. She’s used to being underestimated. Certainly, that’s something that everyone goes through in some way or another, but especially for her, she has all of these layers to her, including, you know, her racial identity and things like that,” Antonia Gentry said. “What we see changing in the show is that she’s suddenly seen by Maxine, or Marcus, and suddenly she’s a person and she is heard and she has this community around her.”

While Maxine is a new kind of Queen Bee — one who wears her melodrama on her sleeve along with her every opinion, thought, and impulse — her brother Marcus initially seems to be a standard of the teen drama: the bad boy. However we soon learn that Marcus isn’t at all what he initially appears. Felix Mallard told Decider it was a “complete privilege” to deconstruct the bad boy cliche.

“It shows, I think, quite a truthful reflection of what a lot of young guys are going through and are experiencing,” Mallard said. “Quite often a lot of young men will create all these barriers, keep people at arm’s length, because they just don’t know how to deal with their own emotions or deal with how those other people are going to make them feel. Quite often that results in bad behavior.” That bad behavior includes not only rule-breaking, but heart-breaking.

“You need to take responsibility,” Mallard continued. “It’s important to communicate that story to young men that your behavior matters.”

Ginny & Georgia doesn’t waste any opportunity to ask the audience to rethink the tropes of their favorite teen dramas. There’s more than one moment where we finally follow a character and discover their home life is not what we’d necessarily expect. The most beautiful example might be when we meet Maxine and Marcus’s loving, wise-cracking deaf father Clint Baker (Chris Kenopic). Family scenes in the Baker household are communicated with spoken dialogue and ASL.

Sara Waisglass said, “I think the inclusion of ASL was really brilliant. I mean, it’s inclusive and authentic. And we as people learn so much just from being able to interact with Chris, who plays our dad, who’s actually deaf.”

Learning ASL ironically helped the actors out in surprising ways. “It became embedded in our performance. Like, if we forgot a line, then the sign would remind us, and if we forgot the sign, then the line would remind us. So it was just really fascinating and really grounded us all,” Waisglass said.

“It was a complete honor. And I think it was also eye opening for myself to my own privilege, that I hadn’t even considered how other families live with varying degrees of hearing and considered what that is like for the deaf community, watching themselves on TV, what sort of characters they can see, all of that sort of stuff,” Mallard said. “Hopefully, you know, we did the justice.”

Ginny & Georgia might have a lot in common with Gilmore Girls, but it pushes its viewers to do more than get caught up in the quirky lives of a young mom and her teen daughter. If anything Ginny & Georgia asks audiences to reconsider our favorite dramas and how much we lean on the fantasy versions of ourselves to define our realities.

Ginny & Georgia is now streaming on Netflix. 

Watch Ginny & Georgia on Netflix