Ginny & Georgia

Plot-wise, G&G delivers. Good trash-plotting is like a river in full spate. A lot rushes past you, it all feels Very Dramatic (although, unlike a river, mostly because of the way it is scored) and you feel like the source will never run dry.

The differences in narrative style and tone between Gilmore Girls and Ginny & Georgia are striking enough that the attempt to feed the algorithmic beast could backfire. But for those who don’t mind their heaping spoonfuls of small-town drama mixed into a much pulpier stew, this new series may satisfy as much as the older one.

Lampert, Fisher, and company are at their best when writing for Ginny, and Gentry doesn’t miss a beat; it’s a performance that manages to be earnest without ever becoming saccharine, and wanders into fraught territory without crossing the line into self-indulgence. ... In the Georgia half of the proceedings, things are considerably rockier.

It’s an uneven and over-long show that shambles toward the last episode in fits and starts. And yet, if you ignore the large-scale structural problems and the question of why this tower of nachos had to be built in a can so big with so many different cheeses, Ginny & Georgia offers plenty of narrative threads to pull you along through the season.

There’s a decent YA show in here somewhere, but along with its abundance of plot, Ginny & Georgia needs to step away from the plethora of Gilmore Girls references to get there.

It all makes for an uncomfortable mix of gentle small-town shenanigans and gritty crime twists, and neither of the two are sharp enough to really hook you. Ultimately, Ginny & Georgia feels like it was made to fill a space in the “Because You Watched” row on Netflix… and for a streamer intent on keeping you binge-watching no matter what, maybe that’s enough.

A twitchy mystery is tacked on to the shallow character studies, a device through which “G. & G.” can launder sermons on self-loathing and self-love, family ties and social alienation. We are teased with a race catharsis between mother and child that never comes to fruition.