TV’s Most Fabulous Antihero Is on Netflix. She’s a Mom. She’s a Murderer. She’s Charismatic as Hell.
This article contains spoilers for the third season of Ginny & Georgia.
While people who only watch “prestige TV” are suffering through something of a June lull, seemingly everyone else is busy mainlining Ginny & Georgia, the Netflix dramedy about a young mother and her teenage daughter, which has been No. 1 on the streamer since its third season premiered last week. The show’s first and second seasons, which came out in 2021 and 2023, respectively, also harvested many minutes for Netflix, but Season 3 is doing something different. Once, the series sat firmly in the realm of “mostly trash TV,” classic Netflix fare; now, though, its fans are declaring themselves to be “rage screaming,” “crying,” “shaking” while watching these 10 new episodes. Ginny & Georgia has become a show that makes people feel—and, dare I say, it’s actually … good?
For those who haven’t yet hopped on the T to the fictional Massachusetts enclave of Wellsbury, you should first know that Ginny & Georgia, which stars Brianne Howey as mother Georgia and Antonia Gentry as daughter Ginny, has many Gilmore Girls bones. Set in New England towns with bucolic main streets, both series follow a fast-talking thirtysomething mother and angsty teenage daughter, all of whom love a good cultural reference. (Georgia to Ginny, in Season 1: “We’re like the Gilmore Girls, but with bigger boobs.”) In each show, there are grandparents offering money that comes with strings attached, and the daughter’s father is an occasional complicating presence. The daughter is precocious, fiercely intelligent, and falls in love with a burnout cutie. A lot of the action takes place in a local café, and the mother has a will-they-won’t-they with the owner of said café. The story of the central family is buttressed by dramatic subplots set in the high school and at adult cocktail parties; both shows love a good town meeting.
But Georgia Miller is absolutely nothing like Lorelai Gilmore, and Ginny—who is biracial, for starters—is nothing like Rory. Lorelai is a born-rich Connecticut girl who, due to circumstance and personality, lives a different life than her parents. Ginny & Georgia is a story about extreme class mobility, achieved against pretty steep odds. Georgia, we learn through interspersed flashbacks (in which she’s played by Nikki Roumel), was born in poverty in the South, to an addict mom and a dad who goes to jail early on. Her stepdad sexually abuses her for years. Georgia runs away at 15, meets Ginny’s dad, Zion, a wealthy kid on a “gap year” road trip, and winds up pregnant.
The rest of the story, between Ginny’s birth and the Millers’ Season 1 in Wellsbury, is the stuff that’s got Ginny & Georgia fans on Reddit posting text blocks analyzing Georgia’s moves like they’re responding to a really good “Am I the Asshole?” post. To get from “homeless and pregnant” at age 15 to “buying a sweet 4-2 in a really good school district” (even if, as one mother complains at a town meeting, “Wellsbury doesn’t send as many students to the Ivy League as Newton!”) at age 31, Georgia uses every weapon at a pretty, charismatic girl’s disposal: manipulation, sweet-talking, alliances with wealthier men who admire her beauty—and, sometimes, if all else fails, straight-up poison.
Brianne Howey plays Georgia as a blond charmer whose features pop like a cartoon—animated, sparkling, always-made-up eyes; the kind of wide, flashy smile that nobody in the world is actually born with. (This is one case where the actor’s veneers perfectly fit the character; Georgia would totally have gotten husband No. 2 to pay for those.) “Your accent makes everything you say sound so convincing,” swoons Maxine (Sara Waisglass), the teen daughter of the next-door neighbors, right after meeting Georgia, and it’s true—Howey gives Georgia a broad, beautiful drawl, and the character’s lines are written with a quick intelligence, which combine to make her endlessly compelling to watch. Georgia loves Scarlett O’Hara—a fact that really bothers Ginny, and that perfectly represents the feral scrappiness that’s at the heart of Georgia’s idea of herself. She proudly drinks cow milk, shuns vegetables, keeps a bunch of guns in the house, doesn’t believe in therapy (“We don’t do that in the South. We shoot things, and eat butter”), and would totally rip down some curtains to make a dress in a pinch.
“I’ve seen you jump a dirt bike over an alligator; you can do anything,” says Ginny’s father, Zion, admiringly. But most of what Georgia does is, frankly, immoral. TV, over the past 20 years, has fallen in love with antiheroes who do the wrong things (torture, murder) for the right reasons (family, saving cities from terrorists); almost invariably, with some Lioness-sized exceptions, these violent characters are men, acting out internal psychodramas about patriarchy and power. Ginny & Georgia, in a rare showing, gives you the antihero as mother—Lorelai Gilmore and John Dutton, together at last, in one bedazzled package. Georgia has been doing bad things for good reasons for so long that she may not have any other personality left—and that is what Season 3 asks viewers to consider.
We come into this season knowing, via flashback, that Georgia has a body count—certainly in the internet sense, but also a real one. First, when Ginny is a toddler, she marries an older creep—her employer and landlord—out of desperation, to keep custody of her daughter amid legal trouble. She slips that guy drugs so she doesn’t have to deal with him slobbering on her, saying annoying things like, “Babe, National Treasure is on!,” and preventing her from leaving the house by threatening to call CPS if she does. He dies, apparently due to a mistaken dosage, and a motorcycle gang that Georgia’s fallen in with helps her get rid of the body. Then, she moves in with another guy, Gil—because he has a real salary (“and a 401(k)!”)—who is physically abusive, and is stuck with him after she gets pregnant with Ginny’s brother Austin. She ends up framing Gil for embezzlement and sends him to jail. Finally, she’s with a third guy—her second husband—who has money but also has started grooming Ginny. Georgia poisons that one, this time aiming for his death, and ends up with all his cash, which is what buys their fancy new Wellsbury house and their fancy new Wellsbury world, Ginny’s first real friends included.
Yes, this is a lot. “Georgia is a diva and i fw dat but her conflict resolution is deffooo murder!” one Redditor wrote, which sums it all up nicely. The show’s third season, upping the stakes even further, has Georgia dealing with the fallout of committing a new kind of murder. At the end of Season 2, after finding out from her frenemy, fellow mom Cynthia (Sabrina Grdevich), that her dying husband’s extended time on hospice care has been draining her sanity and her savings, Georgia suffocates the husband with a pillow, in what she thinks is an act of mercy. This murder—No. 3!—is the one that seems like it will finally expose Georgia to everyone, after Cynthia brings charges and Georgia is dragged away from her wedding to the town’s Kennedy-esque young mayor, Paul (played like a perfect son of Brookline by Scott “Jason Street” Porter), in handcuffs. Over the course of the trial, it appears that every besotted man in Georgia’s orbit who knew only part of her past—Zion (Nathan Mitchell); Paul; Georgia’s smitten friend Joe (Raymond Ablack), who runs the town café—will suss out all the dirt. Ginny suffers at school, as everyone wonders how much she knew (the answer is “a lot”). Zion and Gil (Aaron Ashmore) gang up on Georgia to remove Ginny and Austin from Georgia’s home, in the name of safety—and this is when the viewers really start sobbing.
The show needs to convince you, the same way Georgia convinces the world, that she is a good mom, and that because of that goodness, she deserves mercy. We see that her past experiences, her sense of loyalty, and her resentment of a system that asks women to suffer in silence have led to her doing many things you just definitely should not do, like poisoning husbands, lying to loved ones, and putting a pillow over a man’s head and suffocating him. If this person knows enough security, for a long enough time, the show asks, can she enter the real world and live by normal people’s rules? And can a person who did all that actually be a good parent—or are her kids going to one day realize they were just as duped by her charm as everyone else?
The best tool Ginny & Georgia has for persuading you that Georgia deserves redemption is showing you her parenting in times of crisis. Take Episode 7 of this season, when Ginny discovers that she’s pregnant. Although she’s not supposed to have contact with Georgia, she sneaks into her house to seek her mom’s counsel while the latter is under house arrest. You see, in the way Georgia comforts Ginny, lets her make the final decision, calls the abortion clinic to make an appointment for her, and then gets Ginny’s ex to meet her at the clinic afterward so she’s not alone, that this is a mom who is utterly boundary-free, but also extremely clutch in a pinch. In the simple, straightforward way this abortion is contemplated and accessed—God bless and keep the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!—we also see that Ginny & Georgia, a show about a former teen mom who seems never to have considered this path for either of her own pregnancies, understands something about its audience, which is that it wants to see things change and evolve for this family. Ginny has turned out different from Georgia—or has she? She also gets Austin to lie on the stand, threatens Cynthia with blackmail so she’ll corroborate his story, and sends a violent man who’s innocent of this particular crime up for murder.
In the end, Georgia escapes a life sentence, because Georgia always escapes—but it comes at an ethical cost to her kids. What Ginny does to get Georgia free is even more chilling because her mother didn’t ask her to do it; Ginny has merely learned at the feet of the master. Can Georgia, now free, refrain from killing yet another person? Will she truly, as she says in Episode 10, finally go to therapy? Maybe in Season 4, she’ll run for mayor against Paul, using her perfect political instincts to work inside the system, for once. That would make a lot of sense. Georgia Miller—scammer, charmer, killer—is an American icon for our times, and she deserves public office as much as anyone else.
Slate
