Words: Giulia Lombardo

Everyone’s been talking about it for the past few months: ‘Ginny & Georgia’ is the new series created by newcomer Sarah Lampert and directed by Debra J. Fisher (‘Charmed’, ‘The OC’) that has been available on Netflix since February 24, with a total of 10 episodes.

Virginia (Ginny) Miller (Antonia Gentry) is the 15-year-old protagonist who lives with her 30-year-old mother Georgia (Brianne Howey) and her brother Austin (Diesel La Torraca) in a city in New England, where her mother decided to move after an event that changed her life, and with the only great aim of changing the fate of her two children. Two protagonists, two completely different worlds. A mother, Georgia Miller, irresistible, dynamic, unstoppable and with a desire to live in a unique way; a woman that became a mother at 15 and now, at 30, faces the world as if she could win against anyone. On the other hand, her eldest daughter, Ginny, always thinks clearly, realistically, with the dream of escaping from that world that her mother made her known as the main stage; an unbridled passion for study and knowledge and zero interest in worldliness, dates, boys. 

Georgia continues to be flashy and teaches her younger son Austin how to fight bullying with funny allegories about bees, while the daughter wants to find serenity in New England, that serenity that her mother has never been able to give her in her teenage years.

To complicate the life of Ginny, but also of Georgia herself, is the unclear and very turbulent past of the last, who – after the death of her partner, stepfather of the 15-year-old protagonist – decides to escape to a new city, new challenges and a family to protect more with the bad than the good, creating an aura of mystery that really captures the audience. The dynamics, are continuously evolving and continually enriched with intrigues and subplots, places to increase the share of coincidences and consequences of the story.

If you think of the mother-daughter relationship, although in ‘Ginny & Georgia’ there is also a third member in the family, you can not but think of ‘Gilmore Girls’. The series signed by Amy Sherman-Palladino, founder the of mother-daughter relationships, could have many links with our two new protagonists: on the other hand the mother is single, and the relationship with her daughter is very actual, modern, and without too many constraints. What ’Ginny & Georgia’ does, however, is to evolve the very jovial behaviors of the ‘Gilmore Girls’ family and take them to the next level.

Ginny is the daughter of our time, she is not a “water and soap” girl like Rory Gilmore was; in fact, soon she will find herself understanding her mother’s behavior, valuing it and wanting to almost imitate her. She’ll understand the power that is generated by having relationship with boys, with friends, the way you can’t control your emotions as she always believed she could. The same Georgia, unlike Lorelai, fits perfectly in the contemporary world: if at first she may seem a vamp, a femme fatale, with time she will become a cold tactician and strategist, which hides her past behind a broad smile, ready to become an unscrupulous puppeteer; always with the sole aim of going to defend her family and their future.

A product with a dual identity, that tries to embark on a path of reflection that, for its fear and its style, cannot and does not want to be analytical, discounting the desire to put itself mainly in the window and making, simply, a dream for fans and lovers of tormented, but yet authentic stories.