Ginny & Georgia Review

Georgia Miller (Brianne Howey) had Ginny (Antonia Gentry) as a teenager and has kept the family moving ever since. In Wellsbury she charms her way into a job with the mayor, Paul Randolph (Scott Porter), while Ginny, the new mixed-race girl at school, falls in with the twins next door, Marcus and Max. Flashbacks to Georgia's youth show what she did to survive, and the show's best idea is that her ruthlessness is both her gift to her children and the danger to them. Lucy Mangan's Desperate Housewives meets Gilmore Girls meets Buffy is a fair description of the mix.

Howey is the reason to watch, all Southern warmth over constant calculation, and Gentry plays a fifteen-year-old's contradictions with real intelligence. The writing is the problem. Self-harm, racism, body image and a murder plot all arrive at the same pitch, and some lines are simply bad: the Oppression Olympics argument, and the Taylor Swift jibe in the first finale that Swift herself called lazy and deeply sexist.

Season two leaned harder into topical drama, and the third, organised around a single threat to Georgia, was the first that reviewers found focused. Toronto and Cobourg, Ontario, stand in for New England. It is a huge hit for Netflix and a middling show.