Ginny And Georgia Season 3 Review: Absurd, Addictive And All Over The Place (In A Good Way)

There's a peculiar charm to watching someone commit murder with the same poise they might use to frost a cake. That's the Georgia Miller experience, equal parts molasses and menace. 

Netflix's Ginny & Georgia has never pretended to be subtle. It's loud, proud and high on drama, stitching murder, mother-daughter trauma, and manicured suburbia into a patchwork quilt that's always threatening to come undone. 

In its third season, the series takes that unravelling seriously. With a new showrunner at the helm and courtroom tension in the air, the show barrels forward with the audacity of someone who just smothered a man and still expects to be loved at brunch.

Season 3 opens in the immediate aftermath of Georgia's (Brianne Howey) Season 2 wedding day arrest. A vision in Cinderella blue, she's led away in handcuffs for the mercy killing of Tom Fuller, the comatose husband of her friend-turned-rival Cynthia. 

That wedding dress may be something borrowed and something blue, but the headlines that follow coin a far stickier nickname: "The Mayoress Murderess." The town of Wellsbury, Massachusetts, is aghast. 

Georgia's new husband, Mayor Paul Randolph (Scott Porter), is caught between political damage control and personal disillusionment. Her daughter Ginny (Antonia Gentry), already exhausted by years of upheaval, now walks the school halls with gossip trailing her like perfume. 

And young Austin (Diesel La Torraca), too small to carry the trauma but doing it anyway, finds ways to act out with quiet violence and wide-eyed confusion.

If Season 2 flirted with chaos, Season 3 leans in fully. Georgia, under house arrest and ankle monitor supervision, becomes a neighbourhood voyeur, peering through binoculars and decorating her tracking device with the same giddy flair she once reserved for PTA fundraisers. 

Meanwhile, Ginny tries to maintain some semblance of normalcy, navigating a complicated relationship with the brooding Marcus (Felix Mallard), rethinking her friendships with the MANG girls, and cautiously exploring her voice through poetry. Her writing, both cathartic and revelatory, becomes one of the season's more emotionally grounded threads.

But beneath the teen drama and courthouse couture lies something darker. Austin, the silent witness to Tom's death, is a time bomb of repressed memory and confusion. 

Georgia's past-dotted with abuse, desperation and three separate murders, catches up with her in flashbacks that try to parse out sympathy from an increasingly complicated character. 

Brianne Howey plays Georgia with a studied duality: she's charming and terrifying in equal measure, a Southern belle whose sweetness often smells suspiciously like "cyanide". Yet the tonal whiplash remains. 

One moment we're watching Georgia cry in the bathtub, the next she's cracking jokes while bedazzling her leg monitor. The show constantly tests how much suspension of disbelief its audience can endure.

Season 3 also shifts its focus in a telling way. New showrunner Sarah Glinski brings a firmer hand to the teen ensemble, fleshing out Marcus and Max's grief, Abby's body image issues and the general high school chaos with a level of care that's occasionally missing from Georgia's legal soap opera. 

It's a smart move. Ginny, in many ways, becomes the show's emotional anchor. Antonia Gentry's performance this season is her best yet, balancing teenage impulsiveness with mature introspection. Her sessions with a therapist, brief though they are, bring some of the show's heaviest emotional punches. And Marcus, grappling with depression and alcohol, gets a surprisingly tender arc that never slips into melodrama.

Still, the heart of Ginny & Georgia remains the toxic but magnetic bond between mother and daughter. They hurt each other, forgive each other, repeat. It's a dance as messy as it is intimate. 

The show makes no apologies for how dysfunctional their love is - it leans into it, glorifies it, even weaponises it. And that, more than murder trials or high school poetry slams, is what keeps this drama beating. 

Georgia might be a pathological liar who thinks her crimes are justified in the name of motherhood, but the show insists on letting her be both villain and victim. Whether that contradiction is compelling or exhausting will depend entirely on the viewer's tolerance for morally grey storytelling with a lot of lip gloss and irony.

The courtroom plotline that dominates the latter half of the season is expectedly over-the-top, but it does inject stakes that had begun to sag under the weight of flashbacks and side plots. 

Paul, struggling with his identity as both husband and mayor, finally steps up with a performance from Scott Porter that offers moments of real gravitas. Even Diesel La Torraca gets to shine, with Austin's trauma no longer relegated to the background. In a show bursting with chaos, his silence often says the most.

Of course, Ginny & Georgia can't resist ending with several seismic plot twists - some earned, some not. Flashbacks to Georgia's past set up yet another arc with her former husband Gil (Aaron Ashmore), threatening to stretch the story's believability even thinner. 

But even when the show stumbles, it stumbles with such bravado that you can't help but keep watching. Like Georgia herself, it's a mess you can't look away from.

Ultimately, Season 3 is a fever dream of family dysfunction, legal drama, teenage turmoil and Pinterest-worthy murder. It's not perfect, it rarely even tries to be, but it is oddly magnetic. 

The emotional throughlines still land, the performances continue to evolve, and despite all logic, the show retains its bingeability. Love it or loathe it, Ginny & Georgia understands its audience. And that's more than most series can say.