“Ginny & Georgia” Season 2 Is a Rainbow Tornado of Teen Drama
This review contains mild spoilers for Season 2 of Ginny & Georgia on Netflix, especially the gay parts.
Ginny & Georgia is one of those shows that somehow manages to inflict me with the same feelings the characters are feeling. When Ginny is having a panic attack, my chest feels tight. When Georgia is feeling out of control, I feel my breathing speed up. When Marcus can’t get out of bed, I feel heavy. And when resident lesbian Max is on screen, everything feels brighter and more unpredictable.
In the second season of this show, things get worse before they get better (and then worse again). Ginny learns that just because they’re finally settling into one place doesn’t mean things will magically get better for her. Ginny finally made real, deep connections with girls her own age, but with real friendships comes real heartbreaks and she’s facing that for the first time ever. Max is on a rampage for the first half of the season, misdirecting the heartache of Sophie breaking up with her and taking it out on her closest friends.
Max has a really hard time getting over Sophie, constantly texting her and trying to talk to her when they run into each other. Max is pushed further over the edge when Ginny spots Sophie on a date, not helped by the fact that Max is cast as the wicked witch in the Bridgerton musical knockoff the drama club is doing. (The musical was hilarious but I did spend the rest of the show yell-singing “MARRIAGE IS A DUNGEON. LOVE IS JUST A WEAPON.” every time relationship drama came up. Might be my new theme song.)
One thing I love about Max is how extremely dramatic she is. She hides her real pain behind melodramatic hyperbole, dramatically flopping down and announcing her own inner death on more than one occasion. Eventually she realizes that pushing her friends away isn’t going to heal her broken heart, and in her journey to get over Sophie, she meets Silver (Katelyn Wells), the head of the drama club’s costume department.
The way I would simply perish if a woman dressed like this looked at me like this while dressing me like this???
The theme of this musical is inexplicably (but blessedly) steampunk, so Silver is often smiling shyly at Max while she ties up her corset or buckles a leather strap around her. The gay theater nerd in me screamed about it every time, it was right out of my fanfic dreams, but it takes a while for Max to even realize Silver is into her; she’s so busy looking backwards she doesn’t see what’s right in front of her.
Okay fine I know she’s literally behind her but YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.
This season we get to see a lot more of Max, metaphorically. (Maybe also literally; I didn’t measure/compare screen time to the first season.) We peel back some of the comedic and dramatic armor she wears to see what she calls the charred remains of her heart. We see her heart sink when she realizes she let Ginny down by not being there for her when it came to their racist AP English teacher. We see her grow closer to Bracia, Ginny’s friend who got the lead role, a character she easily could have resented but instead befriended; Max even got invested in Bracia’s showmance, it was very cute. We see her take care of her brother and really worry about him when his depression gets worse. We see her have a really lovely conversation with her father about how deeply important the comedic relief character can be, and that just because she was cast as the witch in the play doesn’t mean she’s not a leading lady. And we see her resist the trope of being friends with your exes, because sometimes it’s just too fucking hard and that’s okay.
Max was unhinged for this and I support her wholeheartedly.
Max is one of those rare queer characters who gets to exist in a second season, and who has her own unique relationships with multiple main characters. Just like her character in the play, she’s the comedic relief while also being vital to the show. Sophie (expertly played by queer VIP Humberly González) is still around because she goes to the same school, and her friends treat her relationship drama with the same weight as anyone else’s. The fact that she’s queer isn’t a topic or a factor, but it’s also not ignored. A lot of shows would have taken her relationship with Sophie ending to reduce the amount of queerness or how much Max mentions an ex-girlfriend or a potential new girl crush, but Max is a rainbow tornado and hardly a scene goes by without her mentioning one or the other. It’s how I imagine a lot of queer teens are these days, in a way I never got to witness as a teen in a Catholic high school in the early 2000s. It’s all the drama of being a teenager in love, without any of the shame. And it’s a delight to watch.
Sara Waisglass’s performance was so fun and full of heart at every turn. And she’s in good company. I was ready to start making papier-mâché Emmy awards to throw at Antonia Gentry and Brianne Howey for their brilliantly devastating performances. Ginny and Georgia’s relationship is so fraught; at times it’s toxic, but they’re trauma-bonded and there’s real, deep, impenetrable love under all the layers of pain and fear and resentment. Ginny is at the age where she’s finally able to start seeing behind the perfectly tailored curtains Georgia always has up. Her mother is no longer this untouchable ice queen, but a formidable statue with wear and cracks she never noticed before.
As someone who has dealt with both, I personally think this show does a beautiful and heart-wrenching job of depicting struggles with self-harm and depression. And it shows the wide range of teenage emotion and how everything from grief and loss to your first relationship going south can seem almost unbearable when you’re at that time of your life when everything is the hardest it’s ever been but somehow still has barely begun all at the same time. To quote a musical about the high school experience, “The world doesn’t end, it just feels like it does.”
Overall season two matched the vibe of the first season, and the whole thing was a dramatic, hilarious, sad, stressful, fun time. And I won’t hold my breath because of all the recent cancellations but I’d love a third season (and so would creator Sarah Lampert), if the TV gods would deign to bless us with one.
Ginny & Georgia’s Lesbian Gets a Refreshingly Typical Teen Dating Story
In a still rare but slowly rising trend, Ginny & Georgia’s lesbian storyline adopts the Gen Z method of teenagers coming out — which is to barely do it at all. Despite being 15, Maxine “Max” Baker has been out to her family and friends for years. Her mother says they found out by way of complimenting Barbie’s boobs, but that’s the last we hear of Max’s “coming out” — she’s known she’s a lesbian for a long time and while she has plenty of other questions and problems, her sexuality isn’t one of them. This lack of a coming out storyline is becoming more and more prevalent and it leaves so much more space to tell the stories that take up the majority of our lives, since for most of us, whether our coming out story was positive, negative, or somewhere in between, it’s just a small part of our lives.
Before I delve into Max’s story, let me give you an overview of the show’s general plot. Ginny is the daughter of former teen mom Georgia, a woman who is as clever as she is gorgeous and knows how to manipulate just about every situation to her advantage, a skill she learned out of necessity. Georgia has moved Ginny and Ginny’s half-brother Austin from town to town for years before settling in a Massachusetts suburb, much to Ginny’s chagrin. The show is marketed as a modern day Gilmore Girls, but while the show is about a young mom and her teenage daughter in a New England city with a small-town mentality, that’s about where the similarities end. It has just as much Desperate Housewives and Mean Girls, with maybe a dash of One Tree Hill, a pinch of Big Little Lies and a splash of Degrassi.
Okay that last one might just be because local coffee shop owner Joe is played by Raymond Ablack aka Sav. (In fact, the whole show is dotted with Canadian faves, like Jennifer Robertson from Schitt’s Creek, Kelly McCormack who played queer mechanic Zeph on Killjoys, and more.) But also, not unlike Degrassi, they tackle a lot of Big Topics like race, self-harm, sexual assault, etc, and while not nearly as After School Special as some teen dramas, it definitely has a Hot Button Topic feel to it at times. Overall, the cast was fairly diverse and Max’s dad was Deaf so a lot of characters spoke ASL, all things that were addressed to varying degrees of success. As a white hearing person, I can’t speak to the POC or Deaf representation — though POC critics and Deaf critics have — but as someone who has had experiences with sexual assault and self-harm, I thought some of the language around those topics in particular was thoughtful and relatable.
Sabrina Reed at Fansided summed up a lot of the criticism about the show when she wrote that the Ginny & Georgia failed Ginny as a Black biracial lead by “playing footsie” with the narrative that only addressed Ginny’s race when it centered on the struggles of being a person of color, while also refusing to give Ginny Black friends.
Many Deaf viewers seem really pleased that Clint was played by Deaf actor Chris Kenopic, who it seem got his start acting when he starred in a viral Hershey’s commercial in Caanda 2019! The Baker family signed so Clint could be included in all the family’s conversations.
When the show wasn’t touching on topics like these, it was fun and quick and interesting and I found myself just as intrigued with the adults’ storylines as the teens’ storylines, which is a rare find for me. It’s imperfect, of course (I don’t want to talk about the Taylor Swift drama, it’s eye-rolly on both sides) but it was a fast, fun watch. Ginny and Georgia are brilliantly acted by up-and-coming Antonia Gentry and Brianne Howey (aka Reagan from Batwoman) respectively, their chemistry flowing naturally whether their scenes involve them being hilarious friends, tense enemies or a loving mother and daughter pair.
HOWEVER we are here today to discuss Max, played by Sara Waisglass, who has been open about liking girls since she was nine and is bursting with energy that she simply cannot contain inside her so it comes tumbling out of her mouth in the form of rapidfire questions, comments, and random unrelated thoughts.
(By the way this is your final spoiler warning; I’m going to get into more specific details about Max’s journey, so if I haven’t convinced you to give it a go yet, keep reading, if I have, stop now and come back when you’re done.)
This is Maxine! Hi, Max!
Max’s friends, Abby and Norah, tease her for being immediately drawn to the new girl Ginny, but Max laments that there aren’t enough girls at their school for her to crush on. Abby and Norah ask her about the one other known lesbian in the school and Max says what I’ve had to say to countless straight people in my long gay life, “Just because she’s gay doesn’t mean I want to hook up with her.” Then she says the girl “puts the yike in dyke” which I am absolutely stealing.
Other relatable moments include but are not limited to her being a horny teen who might only be attracted to girls but will make out with anyone who asks (aka me in college), having even her most supportive friends turn the volume of their voice down when they say “gay” as if it’s a bad word and having to call them on it, having a crush on a straight girl (who, hilariously enough, is played by Devyn Nekoda who is one half of the queer ship on Utopia Falls with someone else who will show up in just a minute), having to pretend you’re okay when you’re not and more.
And then one day, heartbroken and overwhelmed, Max storms into the auditorium to be alone with her feelings and sees Sophie, played by out queer actress Humberly González (you guessed it, the other half of aforementioned Utopia Falls ship.)
Max spews her feelings all over the unsuspecting senior girl and Sophie takes a page from Arizona Robbins’ book and tells her that she’s hot and that next time she should kiss someone who wants to kiss her back.
Max quickly gets in her own head and all her self-assuredness falls away when Sophie is nearby. She watches Norah and Abby drunkenly make out to impress the boys at a party and at first is rightfully grumpy about it, but a few drinks in she thinks maybe this is how she can get Sophie to kiss her, too.
Needless to say it doesn’t go well.
Eventually though they make up and Max gets to try her hand at having a girlfriend for the first time. Sophie teaches Max some Spanish, Max teaches Sophie some ASL, it’s all very cute and sweet.
This was the DREAM when I was in high school, though I wouldn’t have admitted it for a million dollars.
I won’t spoil too much else about how Max’s story plays out, but two things stood out to me, one bad and one good. The bad one is something that happens on TV shows so often I genuinely don’t even think they realize they’re doing it, but one of the most tender scenes between Max and Sophie cuts immediately from them to a straight couple kissing. I think editors just love a kiss-to-kiss transition, but when time and time again I notice it going immediately from girls kissing to a boy and girl kissing, it starts to feel like they’re saying, “Hey forget about that gay stuff, look over here now.” Again, I don’t think it’s always intentional, but it happens enough that I notice it and have considered starting a spreadsheet to keep track of how often it happens. (I have a spreadsheet problem, someone please stop me.)
I will admit my theatre-nerd bias for this scene where Sophie helped Max with her song/lines.
The good thing, however, is that Sophie is bisexual and we learn this during a lunch period when Max is worried about living up to Sophie’s exes, a girl Sophie lifeguarded with an a boy named Ben. Max doesn’t feel any type of way about the fact that Sophie has dated both boys and girls as much as she is stressed that her exes are hot and badass and Max doesn’t even have any exes and she’s worried she won’t measure up.
Show me something cuter, I’ll wait.
Unlike some other shows, their kisses aren’t stolen in the dark, they’re shared with smiles and in soft, bright daylight and overall it’s a very cute story and even though teen drama rears its ugly head, as teen drama is wont to do, I appreciated having a queer story nestled so neatly into the fold. It was really refreshing to see a pretty typical first relationship/”first time” storyline be so queer and done with such care, both by the writers and by the actresses.
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