Family’s the best — and worst — in Netflix’s ‘Ginny & Georgia’
The “Gilmore Girls” comparison is an easy one for “Ginny & Georgia”: a young mother and her teenage daughter, fighting together against everything the world throws at them.
But where Rory and Lorelai faced a coffee shortage and prying grandparents, the eponymous heroines of Netflix’s new series, released last week, have bigger fish to fry, from sexual identity to coded racism.
The 30-year-old Georgia, played by Brianne Howey, is as flighty as she is motivated; at the first sign of trouble, she leaves, uprooting 15-year-old daughter Ginny and younger son Austin and starting over in a new place. When we meet them, they’re on their way to a small town in Massachusetts with Stars Hollow vibes and, she promises, a fresh start.
“She’s this larger than life character,” Howey, 31, told the Daily News. “She consumes all of the oxygen in the room. She’s bold and confident and calculating. But I wanted to make sure that I also kept her grounded and find as much relatability in her as I could, for a woman who is trying to fight so, so hard to keep it together and not show any cracks.”
As the season unravels, so too do Georgia’s secrets, some meant to protect herself, some meant to protect her children. For her angsty teenage daughter, Georgia’s secrets feel like treachery.
“Transparency is important but in the right context,” 24-year-old Antonia Gentry, who plays Ginny, told The News.
“She doesn’t realize how big of a secret, or secrets plural, that Georgia really has. Some things are just really really hard to discuss, but at the same time, you don’t want there to be a barrier or a boundary in the relationship with your child or with your mother. You want to be able to confide in each other. Finding that balance and finding that trust is really what the show explores.”
Georgia, almost immediately, has no problem fitting into the idyllic town. Ginny struggles more, in the ways that a teenager never feels like they fit in and in the more specific ways that the daughter of a single white mom and a mostly absent Black dad surrounded by upper middle class kids who experiment with drugs and alcohol and sex doesn’t fit in.
Across the street, two siblings gravitate toward Ginny: Maxine, a wild child who thrives on attention and chaos, and Marcus, who sulks and mopes and mumbles his way through life.
“I think there’s a sense of boredom and a sense of almost nihilism in the way he conducts himself, but it’s because he has so many masks and so many barriers that I think a lot of young men build up,” Australian actor Felix Mallard, who plays Marcus, told The News.
“I love that the show explores that. It explores what happens when young men are forced to break down those barriers, forced to take accountability, forced to actually live up to their own expectations.”
“Ginny & Georgia” has warmth and laughter and late night dance parties, but its appeal, Howey said, is in the common fears shared by its characters and its viewers. The fears about growing up and the fears of watching your children grow up. The fears that what you’re doing isn’t enough. The fears that no one at school likes you. The fears that secrets will ruin everything.
“Georgia has to be good cop and bad cop at the same time as a single mom,” Howey told The News.
“Because they’re so close in age, from Ginny’s point of view, she does know everything about Georgia. Ginny had to grow up really fast because Georgia exposed her to everything. I think that’s why it feels like even more of a betrayal. Granted, Georgia has made some mistakes and keeping some of this from her daughter, she’s being protective. But I get where Ginny is coming from. Why now? After all we’ve been through together.”