Stars Hollow, like the family relationship it revolves around, is a TV fantasy built on a foundation of spun sugar. This is exactly what the faithful “Gilmore Girls” audience liked about this little American paradise and liked Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory. They were not only a mother and daughter who loved each other very much, but they were also best friends.
Watch a few minutes of “Ginny and Georgia” and one can assume that Ginny Miller (Antonia Gentry) underestimates the portrayal of the mother-and-daughter band, despite the best efforts of her mother Georgia (Brianna Howey) .
We meet them at the moment Georgia’s husband dies suddenly. Shortly after the funeral, she uproots Ginny and her half-brother Austin (Diesel La Torraca) from Houston, Texas, and suddenly moves to Wellsbury, Massachusetts, a wealthy enclave nestled around a postcard-perfect lead role. Ginny accurately describes it as’ like ‘Paul Revere deboned a pumpkin herb slate’. But we recognize it as a substitute for another place.
The creator of the series, Sarah Lampert, clearly created Ginny and Georgia (Brianna Howey) as a film-negative version of Rory and Lorelei, adding the darkness in her characters where ‘Gilmore’ embraces the light. She even mentions that other program in the opening episode she wrote. People who click in and expect a hit from the old Gilmore foam may well be disappointed because ‘Ginny & Georgia’ is not the show.
It lacks the former’s gymnastic dialogue and unapologetic sweetness. Aside from Ginny’s defensive pride in her high academic performance, the writers do not bend backwards to make intellectual viewers feel better when they watch an coming-of-age drama.
None of this is an argument against ‘Ginny & Georgia’. I simply explain what one cannot expect from a program that combines teenage, adult and mysterious soap operas in ten episodes, while also leaning towards worse realities that are rarely or never confronted in Stars Hollow.
The only thing Lorelai and Georgia have in common is that each one is lovely, easy to root for and extremely loyal to her daughter. But where Lorelai is pure sunshine, Georgia’s glow is purely cosmetic. Ginny loves her mother, and she also knows that she is dishonest, curiously silent about her past and probably dangerous. Georgia makes promises she can not keep, such as assuring her children that she is not going out with anyone to focus on. But as soon as she catches a glimpse of Wellsbury Mayor Paul Randolph (Scott Porter of “Friday Night Lights”), the insurance flies out the window.
Wellsbury is the kind of town built for people who look like Georgia, making it ripe for conquest. For Ginny, whose father is Black, it’s less welcoming. The chameleon Georgia still sees the place for what it is and does what it has to do, changing its appearance to fit in with its class-conscious inhabitants.
When she and the children first arrived in the city, Georgia was wearing denim shorts. Not long after she finds Ginny and Austin at their schools, Georgia hits the boutiques and makes her a wardrobe and an outburst suitable to hook up with all the right people.
At the same time, Ginny is confronted by an English teacher who assumes that she has not been cut out for his advanced placement class, and that he does not judge her fashion choices. When she quickly cuts the man in front of her class, she finds a girlfriend in Maxine (Sara Waisglass), who also lives across from her. She also attracts the attention of the popular cute man Hunter (Mason Temple) and Maxine’s restless but warm twin brother Marcus (Felix Mallard). There are worse fortunes for a teenage girl than having two of the prettiest guys at school fight for her affection. And yet Ginny also has to look for peers who want to touch her hair, call her ‘exotic’ and ask which of her parents is black.
“Ginny and Georgia” could have omitted these little aggressions instead of inserting them accurately into his storyline and making an attractive Netflix teen show work with the numbers.
There are many other reasons for Ginny to feel like an outsider, including the classic: she’s the new kid in a small town where everyone knows everyone. She is the child of a single parent with a lavish southern attire built to evoke snobbery, especially in New England.
The fact that the writers make the effort to confront the comfortable racial politics of places like Wellsbury should deserve a little more respect than it may get. And it mostly handles it secretly. That clothing store where Georgia hangs out? Completely achieved with a string of small drawbacks. While Ginny later succumbs to peer pressure and tries to fit in by being with their shoplifter, she is the only one caught because she is the only one the boutique visitor is looking for.
Playing with class conflict in a show like this is easy. Leaning on other essential American ugliness while permeating the plot of the plot with black humor and snoring is a more challenging knit.
This show mixes all these emotional colors beautifully, and also makes sure that neither Ginny, nor Georgia or anyone else is one-dimensional. Not even Wellsbury’s resident queen at Cynthia (Sabrina Grdevich) is utterly abominable; she may be used to getting her way, but she’s also being secretly undermined by Georgia, which is all honey, smiles and ambition.
As messy and terrifying as Georgia can be, she’s also an entertaining manatee and exciting to watch. She is a predator, but less a wolf than a coyote, a creature whose prey drift is coded for survival as opposed to dominance. Her personality also wins her a true friend in Max and Marcus’ mother Ellen (Jennifer Robertson), who is Wellsbury’s only truly comfortable, accepting person. (Not for nothing, she is also married to a deaf man, and in all the scenes the family shares the actors all use sign language while saying their rules.)
Of course, all the existing problems in Georgia came together when she started setting others in motion, which further alienated her children who were already suffering in the process.
Gentry’s sensitive performance carries the weight of ‘Ginny & Georgia’, and she carries her character’s excitement, hope and pain with a heartbreaking lightness. When we experience the world through Ginny’s eyes, it’s as intoxicating and seductive as her mother wants it to be, but when she warns us in her moody voice story to buy her mother’s act completely, it’s foolish.
Ginny also has her secrets. She is also the daughter of a shady woman who lies, steals and cheats to get what she wants, perhaps not explicitly to move forward, but certainly to take a few steps in front of something she is running from. However, Howey never allows us to completely hate Georgia, not even when we look at how she gets along in the here and now, which can make life harder for them along the way.
Nevertheless, as part of a series of series featuring and defining “Gilmore” on one side of the scale, and the stylized nightmare “Euphoria” on the other, a show like “Ginny & Georgia” plays like a product of Netflix’s algorithm – a little Stars Hollow and a few parts “13 reasons why” with a touch of “White Oleander” to add a little spice. But it just proves that he knows his audience and relies on his awareness of the world we live in now, a place where Stars Hollow feels more unrealistic than ever before. Wellsbury is also fictional, but we know its places and its people. This may be why we can relate more to the Millers with all their unenviable flaws and the melodrama that mother and daughter create around them.
Wise people would not dream of wanting to experience (or re-experience) Ginny’s pains or face the threat that Georgia poses through her actions. But damn if this is not a good time to look at a safe distance.
“Ginny & Georgia” is now streaming on Netflix.