There’s a scene at the beginning of The Cat in the Hat when the cat, eager to entertain the two young protagonists, starts jumping on a ball and then adds a fish in a pot, a rake and a cake, books, a toy boat. For a moment, the cat balances, triumphant in his ability to juggle so much all at once, and then it all comes crashing down. 

That’s Ginny and Georgia. In just 10 one-hour episodes, the show explores race, class, sex, sexual orientation, disability, domestic abuse, murder, toxic friendships, first love, mother-daughter relationships, complex family dynamics, self-harm, body dysmorphia, the stress of college admissions, how small towns fit into the national narrative surrounding controversial political issues, infidelity, and betrayal. Sometimes this works. But there are moments when it adds just one more theme, jeopardizing the precarious equilibrium the show has established and threatening to topple the endeavor. Ginny and Georgia has the potential to go beyond the superficial, but because of its myriad plotlines, it only dips its toes into the shallows of each topic. 

And because of its ambition, the show struggles with tonal incongruity between its two protagonist’s stories. Sullen, precocious 15-year-old Ginny (Antonia Gentry) would fit well into an episode of “Freaks and Geeks” or “Never Have I Ever,” while her 30-year-old sexpot mother Georgia, (Brianne Howey) with a white-trash, gangbanging, law-defying past and a Jack Kerouac-wannabe first love is a combination of “Breaking Bad” and the soap opera “Dynasty.” Predictably, the Ginny scenes and storylines are much more successful.

While the script isn’t impervious to cringeyness, there are very honest moments of teen life: group chat gossip sessions (and the annoyance at one friend for having an Android, thus ruining the chat aesthetic), passive-aggression that erupts when one friend slaps another and then everyone bursts out laughing, a friend who secretly duct tapes her thighs out of shame about her body, a racist teacher who justifies his microaggressions against biracial Ginny by declaring that he“voted for Obama twice,” a very realistic theater kid best friend who would probably be intolerable to anyone older than 17, as evidenced when her older girlfriend gently breaks up with her. 

Ginny feels especially fleshed out as she navigates her complex adolescent world, straightening her hair to fit in better in her overwhelmingly white, affluent new town, struggling to set boundaries with her mother, bottling up her emotions until they explode in contentious fights and in one scene, an eloquent spoken word poem. Gentry’s acting is raw and authentic, injecting humanity into scenes that could otherwise feel inorganic (read: the drunken teen party montages that seem compulsory for Hollywood at this point). 

Then this is jarringly interrupted by Georgia’s struggles to make a conventional new life for her family, dating the Kennedy-esque town mayor (and juggling two other love interests) while remaining haunted by her murderous past. However, the only thing unambiguous about Georgia is her moral ambiguity, making her an interesting character to watch, one you root for while questioning your own ethics for rooting for her. 

In the show’s first episode, Georgia remarks in her bright Southern accent, “We’re like the Gilmore Girls, but with bigger boobs.” It’s a clever marketing ploy to present Ginny and Georgia as a 2021 version of the beloved early ‘00s show, and there are unsubtle parallels. But Ginny and Georgia is bigger, bolder, sexier, more suspenseful, and busier than its counterpart. However, to its credit, the show is also less whitewashed, handles sex well whereas Gilmore stigmatized or ignored it, captures the complexities of being a “smart girl” who also wants to be a normal teenager without caricaturizing said girl, and shows how the mother-and-daughter-as-best-friends dynamic is toxic instead of romanticizing it and making the young women watching sigh, wishing our mothers had us at 15.

The cat in the hat is fun, but ultimately, he’s just too much, and he’s sent packing for it.  If Ginny and Georgia can condense its plethora of plots in the next season and stick to the empathetic realism it does well, it could stand the test of time as well as Gilmore Girls has. But that’s a big if.