Ginny & Georgia Argues That Grounded Mental Health Storylines Have a Place in Trash TV

Describing Ginny & Georgia, whose third season was released on Netflix last week, is not an easy task. It’s part teen drama and part soapy thriller. It’s about the tumultuous relationship between a mother and a daughter. The most obvious comparison, Gilmore Girls, feels less relevant than ever in season three, which revolves around a murder trial for Georgia, who’s been charged with killing her friend’s very sick husband while he was on hospice care. This is a murder we’ve seen her commit—she suffocated him with a pillow.

Georgia is an absurd character who is often difficult to take seriously, between her trauma-stuffed past, proclivity towards various shades of criminal activity, and array of mostly boring and two-dimensional love interests. But the other half of the story—Ginny’s half—is very different. Where Georgia’s story goes for broad melodrama and black comedy, Ginny’s aims for realism. Between Ginny and her friends, it often feels like the show really does want to say something true about the teenage experience. It’s in this half of the story that Ginny & Georgia feels most compelling, no matter how many fake pregnancies, real pregnancies, abusive ex-husbands, and murder charges the show throws Georgia’s way.

The YA story is also where Ginny & Georgia attempts to tell serious, relatively grounded stories about the mental struggles of its teen characters. As you can imagine, these are not stories that are especially tonally compatible with a heightened murder trial filled with the usual courtroom antics. Still, the show’s vision—perhaps a misguided one—insists that both things can coexist.

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Calling Ginny & Georgia “trash” feels reductive but also somewhat accurate considering the lengths the show is willing to go to elicit gasps from the audience, even when its shocks are not necessarily earned. The trashiness of it all is most visible when it comes to Georgia, whose conflict in season three relies way too heavily on the uninteresting question of whether she can truly believe herself to be a good person. The answer to that, I would argue, is of course not—but also, who cares? Investing in Georgia as a character requires a distance from reality that renders her more of an exaggerated sketch than a real person. It doesn’t help that most season three hinges around fallout of her decision to kill Tom Fuller, which was nonsensical to begin with and feels even less plausible now that show has given its consequences actual weight. This would be less of a problem if the show didn’t also ask you to invest in the very grounded problems of Ginny and her friends at the same time.

Exactly how much praise Ginny & Georgia deserves for its mental health storylines has been contested. Sometimes, especially in the beginning, it did feel like the show utilized mental illness for sensationalist impact. Ginny’s self-harm felt tacked-on in the first season, something the show was criticized for at the time. The second season responded to this criticism by doubling down. Ginny confides in her father, Zion, about her self-harm and goes to therapy, where she slowly works through some of her issues. Therapy sessions don’t necessarily make for the most thrilling television, but the decision to show Ginny in therapy demonstrated that Ginny & Georgia was willing to follow through on its stories about mental health. The decision to go deeper into the issue, and to show not just moments of distress but also how healing might happen, signaled that Ginny & Georgia cared about mental health as something more than just another well of drama.

Come season three, the show has broadened its teen storytelling to more deeply explore the issues of other characters. Marcus, Ginny’s ex-boyfriend, fell into depression at the end of the second season. In season three he continues to struggle, descending into alcoholism. Meanwhile, Maxine—his sister, and Ginny’s best friend—watches his downward spiral without knowing what to do. Neither sibling ends the season in a good place. The last few episodes of the season feel almost too dark, too brutal in their portrayal of how one person’s mental health crisis can spill over to affect those who care about them most. The ninth episode, which focuses on Maxine’s mounting concern for her brother’s wellbeing as she struggles to keep her own sadness under control, is the best episode the show has ever done.

In another great moment from season three, Ginny and her friend Norah confront Abby—another friend—about the eating disorder she’s been quietly struggling with since the first season. With some encouragement, they get her to admit what’s happening. But she downplays it, explaining that she’s fine and that it’s under control. Needless to say, these are lies. But Ginny and Norah, well-intentioned as they may be, are not equipped to understand the extent of what their friend is dealing with. Their empathy for Abby makes the scene sweet and somewhat hopeful, but that hope is undercut by the realization that there is something more serious going on that was never going to be resolved by a single empathetic conversation.

That a scene like this can occur in the same episode where Georgia, realizing that her murder conviction is all but inevitable, leaves town on a stolen motorcycle before deciding to turn herself into the police for reasons that aren’t entirely coherent, is strange. It’s even stranger when the fallout of Maxine’s decision to break her brother’s trust and tell her parents about his increasingly worrisome behavior is immediately followed by Austin, Ginny’s nine-year-old half-brother, shocking the courtroom by pinning the murder Georgia committed on his abusive father—accompanied, naturally, by a darkly melodramatic and hilariously on-the-nose pop song. But this is nothing new for Ginny & Georgia, which has demonstrated season after season that it doesn’t particularly care about tonal whiplash.

The tonal mess would be easier to write off if Ginny & Georgia‘s mental health storylines weren’t some of the best of any teen drama. Creator Sarah Lampert has been open about working closely with a psychologist and with Mental Health America. This doesn’t mean that the show gets everything right, but it does mean that it avoids many of the pitfalls of similar shows—Gen V and Euphoria come to mind—that also tackle issues like depression, self-harm, substance abuse, and eating disorders. It’s to the show’s credit that Ginny’s self-harm is shown sparingly, or that we never actually see Abby making herself throw up. Leaving some of the most upsetting symptoms of mental illness implied avoids triggering the target audience, which skews young, and also affords these characters a level of empathy and respect.

But what really elevates the mental health storytelling above sensationalism is its nuance and specificity. For all its melodramatic impulses, Ginny & Georgia seems genuinely interested in how mental illness might impact the lives of the teens in a realistic way. Characters don’t always respond to things in a healthy manner. They sometimes lash out unfairly and hurt the people close to them. The show demonstrates that asking for help is possible and good, but also that the recovery process looks different for everyone. For Ginny, therapy is largely effective, giving her resources and support systems that help her stop self-harming. For Marcus, things are more complicated. Even with therapy and medication, his depression persists.

It’s incredibly frustrating that this aspect of the show is diluted by the out-there plot twists and shallow tropes that define Georgia’s side of the story, begging the question of whether a better version of the show would ditch the soapy melodrama entirely and go all in on being a relatively grounded high school drama. But that’s not how Ginny & Georgia is wired, and sometimes, usually when the show manages to tether Georgia’s ludicrous behavior to something at least a little bit grounded in reality, the wild tone shifts can be fun and exciting. The seventh episode of season three, where Ginny turns to her mother for help with an unwanted pregnancy, is a welcome reprieve from Georgia’s constant anxiety about going to prison for exactly that reason—it gives Georgia the precious opportunity to be a real person and brings the mother-daughter dynamic at the center of the show back to something relatable and true.

Besides, there’s something admirable about the show’s insistence that its soapiest tendencies need not interfere with its more grounded storylines about mental health. It remains equally committed to both sensibilities, no matter how much they push and pull at each other, and will likely continue to pursue the conflicting aspects of its identity for as long as it exists. Ginny & Georgia aspires to entertain as much as possible—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—but while doing so makes the case that so-called trashy TV shows can also be serious, relevant, and moving. It’s that sentiment that makes Ginny & Georgia so easy to like.

One can always hope that in season four the show will finally find a way out of the tonal mousetrap it’s created for itself. But even if it doesn’t, I think that Ginny & Georgia is worth rooting for anyway.

Ginny & Georgia Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.

Ana Carpenter writes about film, TV, and theater.