Contains major spoilers for Ginny and Georgia season 3.
Netflix’s Ginny and Georgia has explored serious and complex themes since the very beginning, but its latest season is the heaviest yet. Season 2 ended with Marcus (Felix Mallard) breaking up with Ginny (Antonia Gentry) due to his worsening depression, which continues to decline during season 3 in a powerful portrayal of the mood disorder. Ginny’s mother Georgia (Brianne Howey) was also arrested for murder at her wedding to Mayor Paul Randolph (Scott Porter). Ginny is absolutely going through it, but she and Marcus are not the only teens struggling with their mental health. What surprised me the most was Maxine’s (Sara Waisglass) story—an experience I don’t recall ever seeing reflected on screen (although if you know some, please let me know). At the end of season two, Max’s anxiety skyrockets following the end of her relationship with Sophie (Humberly González) and the fallout of the MANG friend group as each friend dealt with their respective issues. With everything continuing to get worse in season 3, everyone stops paying attention to Max, causing her to be excluded.
Max is a bubbly, confident, and outgoing lesbian who excels in musical theatre. She has a big personality and a huge heart which comes with intense emotions. She’s a strong communicator and isn’t the type to hold things in. Max can come across as self-centred at times, but she’s very loyal to her friend and incredibly caring of Marcus, her older brother, who she’s close to. With Marcus’s history of mental health problems, Max has always been tasked with being the good daughter who brings joy to everyone’s lives. She takes this role seriously but often finds no one has room for her big feelings while she takes on everyone else’s—especially as their parents, Ellen (Jennifer Robertson) and Clint (Chris Kenopic), are too focused on Marcus, whose best friend died a year prior to season 1. Usually, Max copes because she has a good support system through her friends, but that changes very quickly over the course of this season.
When speaking about her character to Teen Vogue, Waisglass said: “I think [Max] has vulnerability as a superpower, and she wants that for everyone else because she thinks there’s so much freedom in that, and when you hold your feelings in, that’s just complicating a lot of sh*t. Whereas if you live your heart on your sleeve, I think everything’s just easier for her. So not only do I think she encourages other people to live loud and out there and be honest about what they’re feeling, but I think she would rather have that and be able to be there and support that person than just leave them to have their big feelings alone. She wants to be there for people, she wants to help them feel those feelings, and that’s what makes her such an incredible friend.” After being quite immature during the previous seasons, Max showed tremendous growth in season 3 by trying to be there for her friends and stop making everything about herself.
Max’s Declining Friendships
Ginny is dealing with self-harm and her mother being on trial for murder, amongst a myriad of other things, which is obviously way more than a teenager should be expected to handle. Ginny has a prickly personality and isn’t very open about her feelings, which is likely why she turned to self-harm in the first place. She can come off as quite selfish and oblivious to what those around her are dealing with, but she has a lot of heavy trauma to process so that’s to be expected. Max tries to support Ginny but accepts when she doesn’t want to talk about her mother’s arrest. She even sticks up for her and Georgia when people like Norah (Chelsea Clark) are talking about them behind their backs. That’s why Max feels hurt when she learns that Ginny later confided in Bracia (Tameka Griffiths). When Max tries to tell Ginny how she feels, Ginny says, with an air of detachment, that they’ve just drifted apart and aren’t close friends anymore, which is the very thing Max was trying to fix. Friend breakups are rarely explored in cinema, but they’re often a painful experience for many. Waisglass told L’Officiel USA, “I think my storyline is probably the most relatable, just in the sense that everyone has felt excluded before.”
Abby (Katie Douglas) is rather moody and frequently comes off as blunt or rude. She has body dysmorphia and bulimia, which is explored further in season 3. She’s deeply insecure and affected by her parents’ divorce, especially as she was close to her dad growing up, who now lives with his new girlfriend, and her mother Nancy (Victoria Fodor) turned to drinking and became neglectful. Abby tried to confide in her friends in season 1 but was constantly brushed off, though she eventually confronted them about this. She also confronts Nancy in season 3 who eventually apologises.
Abby is one of the main people who tells Max she is dramatic, always blows things out of proportion, and says her feelings are “a lot to handle.” She even hides her new relationship with Tris (Noah Lamanna) from Max because she doesn’t want her to turn it into a big deal like when Max came out with “a press conference in third grade.” Despite her behaviour, Abby is a caring person and doesn’t want to hurt Max’s feelings and make her feel left out. This is why she creates the ANG group chat and hides when the group hangs out without her, like when they bonded at Abby’s, sharing their darkest secrets, and then went on to egg her dad’s new house. Even though they don’t always intend to leave Max out, they make it worse by hiding it from her completely, which only makes Max feel more excluded when she finds out.
Norah is the least developed character, though she is the most stable. She’s portrayed as a kind and supportive friend, but she’s highly susceptible to peer pressure. Her mother is a local news reporter who adopted her from a young age. Norah struggles with feeling underappreciated by her boyfriend Jordan (Colton Gobbo) and mentions that she’s trying to get help for some menstrual difficulties, but no one knows what’s wrong with her. This suggests she might get a more focused storyline in season 4. Norah spends her time reading smut and doing fairy makeup on her secret TikTok account, which her friends make fun of. Norah is also the only member of MANG who feels uncomfortable around Ginny during Georgia’s trial, especially when her own mother is reporting it on.
Max Is Too Much
We get a deeper look into Max’s state of mind after she sees Georgia in her garage about to steal Marcus’s motorbike and make an escape. Max is seen pacing around her bedroom fuelled with racing, anxious thoughts about the situation and what to do about it. Should she tell someone? Should she tell Ginny? Should she do her homework? She texts some friends, including her new girlfriend Silver (Katelyn Wells), and even calls Ginny, but there’s no response—from anyone. The next day, Silver asks Max, “Are you okay? Those texts last night,” to which Max responds, “You got those? Did you just, like, ignore them?” Silver responds with, “Oh, I had a lot of homework, didn’t want to get distracted,” and Max looks crushed. (Dialogue might be somewhat paraphrased.)
What makes things more difficult for Max is that her close relationship with Marcus begins to fracture alongside her friendships—and she’s the only one who seems to be taking Marcus’s rapid decline seriously. She is criticised by her friends when she tries to help him, with Abby calling her a “killjoy” for trying to make an incredibly drunk Marcus leave a party. Even Silver, who is also Marcus’s friend, helps him get alcohol and seems indifferent to his behaviour. But when Marcus threatens to never speak to Max again if she tells their parents about his drinking, Max tells them anyway. It was immediately after her performance in the school’s musical that she tells her parents about Marcus, knowing that this moment doesn’t need to be about her. Waisglass told Netflix: “I love that [Max] pushes herself to the limit of trying to help Marcus without going to her parents. It’s only when it reaches a breaking point, and it’s so heartbreaking for their relationship.” This is also why it hurts even more when their parents initially don’t do much about Marcus’s drinking.
With everyone’s attention on Marcus, people fail to see Max falling into her own depression. At one point, we hear Max thinking: “I understand how he feels because I feel it too. I just hide it better. I worry about him all the time. Does he worry about me like this? Does anyone think about me as much as I think about them? I know I feel too much. But isn’t that good too?” Waisglass told Netflix: “Whereas Marcus’s coping mechanism is to turn inward, Max turns outward. It’s really interesting to show the other side of mental health, which is how to be there for someone who doesn’t necessarily have the energy that they normally have to interact with you in that normal way.” Mental illness can manifest differently, even within the same family, which Max and Marcus demonstrate.
Max tries to repair her friendships, but it results in them pushing her away even more. It was upsetting when Ellen told Max to not try and fix things with them because she’ll only make it worse—implying that Max is the problem. It feels like Max’s main purpose is to appease everyone else at the expense of herself. No one is willing to see her growth or forgive her for past mistakes. Max gets the message—much stronger than usual—that her personality and emotional intensity are too much. With no one else to turn to, Max is alone with her pain which is devastating. She’s an open communicator, but her friends and family make her feel bad for being who she is because they don’t care about that stuff, or rather, they deal with it differently. She starts second guessing herself, wondering if the traits she once saw as positive are actually bad.
Season 4 could see Max become very insecure and turn inward. Although heartbreaking, it would be interesting to see a usually-cheerful character like hers withdraw and become much more anxious and depressed. Mallard told Netflix he thinks Marcus will “respond to discipline and structure” in rehab. I hope that, upon his return, he’s the one to eventually notice a change in Max and reach out to her. Max has a huge heart and I hope season 4 allows her family and friends to realise they have been taking her for granted and to make things right. It has the potential to be an incredibly emotionally rewarding season that shines some light on the different ways mental illness can look.
Leave a Reply