On the surface, there shouldn’t be many similarities between Georgia Miller, played by Brianne Howey in Ginny & Georgia, and Joe Goldberg, who is brought to life by Penn Badgley in You. The former serves as a single mother who is new to town and looking to start a career for herself while the latter is comfortable with a life working in a bookstore. Yet, the differences that may be present on the outside are nothing but a facade for the striking similarities the two share in their internal makeup. It's this composition that has made these two actors and the shows they star in smashing successes on the streaming platform. In order for viewers to fully believe just how far these opposite-end-of-the-spectrum characters would go for the people they love, the performances by Howey and Badgley have to be convincing. It's for these reasons that the two shows work so well and have their audiences constantly asking themselves just how far they’d go for the loved ones in their own lives.
There’s No Stopping This Mother in 'Ginny & Georgia'
Through two seasons, fans of Ginny & Georgia have learned more and more about the backstory of Howey’s character. What show creator Sarah Lampert has struck a chord with is offering many sides to the maternal figure, many of which are extremely flawed, but all of them are real. While the lengths to which Lampert and her team of writers go to in order to stress Georgia's actions are extreme, it’s what allows Howey the canvas to convey these emotions and actions. Ginny & Georgia is packed with high school drama surrounding Georgia's daughter, Ginny (Antonia Gentry) and her cast of friends, but it’s the scenarios that unfold in Georgia’s life that make this series excel.
In Howey’s breakthrough role, she’s given the daunting task of making viewers actually care about a character who has a laundry list of crimes ranging from theft to embezzlement to the worst of them all, poisoning and killing her ex-husband. This should be a character who is easy to hate, one who is filled with toxicity and leaves a wake of destruction behind her. After all, Ginny & Georgia doesn’t really present a villain-figure or anyone whom watchers should actively root against, which makes Howey's delivery even more impressive. Showing just how far a mother would go, Georgia’s heinous actions, outside a few unruly acts like stealing from a convenience store in her younger years, all have an explanation rooted in the love of her children. She put an end to her second husband after witnessing Kenny (Darryl Scheelar) grope her daughter, a trigger for her after experiencing sexual abuse growing up. As dark as it may have seemed, enlisting poisonous wolfsbane and mixing it into a post-workout smoothie for her husband, eventually causing him to suffer a heart attack and crash his car, Georgia did so to protect her daughter.
There’s also the matter of her first husband, as brief and fake as it may have been, which saw Anthony (Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll), her landlord, threatening to call social services if she left him. That’s when Georgia had her friends in the motorcycle gang take him out of the picture so that she wouldn’t lose custody of her daughter. The last death at Georgia's hands was Tom (Vincent Legault), the husband of Cynthia (Sabrina Grdevich) who is in a terminal coma. After listening to Cynthia express how she is prepared for it to be over because it’s impossible for her to go on with her life this way, Georgia decides to "help" this budding friendship of hers by...smothering him with a pillow. It's a horrible, unexcusable act — but in Georgia's head, this brutal action would serve as the necessary start of Cynthia’s next life.
Are her actions cruel? Yes, there’s no doubt — but that’s the beauty of Ginny & Georgia and Howey's multilayered performance. Because throughout this entire series, even though it feels wrong, it’s often hard not to root for her. Season 2 was heavy in its messaging, eventually seeing the two co-leads in therapy together as Ginny could no longer bottle up the harmful energy exhibited by her mother, but it's the small moments like when she is seen breaking down in tears feeling as though she failed after learning that Ginny has been self-harming that offer a deeper insight into the character. There’s a real sense of self-reflection that is easily invoked with each outlandish situation Georgia faces and overcomes. This is why her character elicits everything needed to be the perfect anti-hero.
'You's Joe Goldberg Is a Complex Man Who Does Right in His Own Mind
When it comes to making us care for a heinous serial killer, there’s no one who does it quite like Joe Goldberg, who will see his story continue with the fourth season dropping on Netflix this month. Exuding all the qualities of his Gossip Girl role — a show that saw him being the titular character who watched over everyone — Badgley’s latest starring role sees him using those same tactics but in a much darker and more twisted way as the audience is shown the story through his obsessive eyes. Unlike his Netflix counterpart Georgia Miller, Badgley’s character doesn’t have a family to worry about (at least through the first two seasons), so where his intense love falls is on the shoulders of the women he admires from afar.
It begins with Beck (Elizabeth Lail) in Season 1 of You, a character who is easy to fall for and someone who is naive enough to make her the ideal love interest for Joe. The means for which he does so are beyond extreme — from the excessive geo-tracking and creepy stakeouts from across the street — and there is no justification for having any sympathy for a man who goes to these limits. The intrigue of You, however, is the twistedness that the show writers reach to in order to showcase that inside his own head, what he's doing is totally normal. To him, he is a man who is simply protecting the woman he sees as his equal. The reason he ends up killing Beck’s best friend, Peach (Shay Mitchell), is because she does nothing but hold Beck back in Joe’s eyes. Why would he want this negative person in her life? Earlier in Season 1, he held Beck's boyfriend, Benji (Lou Taylor Pucci), in captivity in a glass box he just so happens to have under the bookstore. Like Peach, Benji was no good for Beck. These are all monstrous means of displaying his affection, but through Badgley's narration which offers his internal thoughts on each grotesque mechanism, You depicts a character, like Georgia, who is nothing short of complex in nature but is one who believes what they are doing is for the greater good of those near to them.
These same endeavors carry over after he winds up killing Beck once she learns of his actions. Joe also discovered Beck had an affair with her therapist, for whom Joe ends up blaming her murder on. If he can’t have the love of his life, then no one can. You's creative team doesn't hold back in depicting this macabre way of displaying his affection, but as the narrative goes, the audience is inside Joe's mind and sees that the horrible things he is doing are being manipulated by himself in his own mind to be routine.
Eventually, Joe finds himself out West in California where he falls for Love (Victoria Pedretti). She ultimately meets her death in Season 3 as Joe realizes how dangerous she is, which is ironic because she serves as a mirror of himself. In his eyes, taking Love out was for the greater good — after all, he couldn’t let a person he viewed as a monster carry out any more awful acts. In a weird twist of events, Joe had learned that Love killed her first husband with wolfsbane a la Georgia Miller with Kenny.
Tragic love interests aside, where Badgley’s performance really stands out is how he interacts with the younger kids in his life. In You Season 1, it’s Paco (Luca Padovan), a young boy who has a shared interest in reading who lives with an abusive step-father. Joe cares for him along the way and makes sure to keep him distracted from what’s going on in his household with new books. This shows that there may still be some scrap of humanity left in this abusive character. He ultimately kills Ron (Daniel Cosgrove), the step-father, to put an end to the abuse.
This same storyline plays out in You Season 2 with Ellie, who is played by Jenna Ortega. Another murder at the hands of Joe is a result of his connection to the young girl. He learns that Henderson (Chris D'Elia), a comedian in town who agrees to help Ellie, has been sexually abusing underage girls. In an effort to protect his neighbor, Joe drugs him before accidentally pushing him down the stairs to his death. There are plenty of egregious murders in You but Badgley's performance is so convincing that viewers can’t help but feel some type of way for this deeply complex lead. Like Georgia, the events played out by Joe are all out of what he feels are for the best for those in his life. While Ginny & Georgia goes pretty far to get its points across, You goes over the line and breaks through glass ceilings in order to share its messages, albeit in a grim and toxic manner.
No one who watches these two series would agree with the means to which Howey’s Georgia and Badgley’s Joe go to in order to protect. That in itself speaks to how powerful these performances are as the real reason they carry out these morally wrong actions is clear. Behind Georgia’s beauty lies a brutally scarred person and the same can be said of Joe Goldberg. Past trauma fuel these two in wanting to protect the ones close to them. It’s impossible not to watch both Ginny & Georgia and You and not wonder just how far is too far, and that’s a testament to the brilliance displayed on screen by these two actors.
You Season 4 Part 1 drops on Netflix on February 9. You can check out the trailer below.