Ginny & Georgia review: season 2 needs more Ginny, less Georgia

Expanding the whitewashed world of Wellsbury, Ginny is given a Black support system—a gaggle of new girlfriends in school, a thoughtfully appointed therapist, her once-absent dad Zion (Nathan Mitchell), who recently relocated to Boston—folks who look and live like her, and can act as a soundboard when a racist English teacher burdens her with adding diversity to the curriculum, or when her mother dons a Scarlett O’Hara costume for Halloween. The addition of therapy offers a direct line into Ginny’s thinking, the universal pains of growing up, and the specific struggles of how Georgia’s cons and crimes affect her, portrayed more effectively than those droll voice-overs the show has employed in both seasons.

If only similar insider access were provided to the rest of Ginny’s high-school cohorts, including her “MANG” BFFs Maxine (Sara Waisglass) and Abby (Katie Douglas), who are dealing with queer love and body dysmorphia, respectively. Ginny & Georgia doesn’t have time to flesh out their lives because it’s busy, well, being another show: a sudsy Desperate Housewives-meets-How To Get Away With Murder packed with private investigators, political scheming, and plenty of baby-daddy drama. Aaron Ashmore enters as Austin’s shady dad Gil Timmins, joining Zion, town mayor Paul Randolph (Scott Porter), and café-owner Joe (Raymond Ablack) as potential suitors for Georgia.

The disjointedness is worsened by the lead actresses often feeling like they’re acting on entirely different levels, Gentry opting for wide-eyed earnestness and Howey country-hamming it up with that big Julia Roberts smile and even bigger Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias twang. There is little linking the two protagonists, and that absence of a Lorelai and Rory-style love connection makes it difficult to believe Georgia when she performs yet another Southern-fried soliloquy about how all of her scams, seductions, and skeletons were out of sheer devotion to her daughter.

It doesn’t help that the series never fully allows Georgia to become the Big Bad thanks to frequent flashbacks to her tragic past as a teen mom (portrayed by Nikki Roumel) and Howey’s innate likeability. The show sympathizes with the scrappy mother, even when she’s committing the worst of offenses her children regularly suffer as a consequence. “I took all the darkness, and I ate it. I became it, like freakin’ Bane,” Georgia proclaims in one tense confrontation with Ginny. Still, Howey plays all of Georgia’s transgressions with a twinkle in her eye—less like a felony and more like a flirt—and even she doesn’t seem to buy her character’s supposed wickedness wholly.

“You’re such a force. You take up a lot of space,” Ginny tearfully tells her mother in season two. “Sometimes I feel like there’s not always room for me.” That’s the actual downfall of Ginny & Georgia—it doesn’t know when to get Georgia out of Ginny’s way.