Ginny & Georgia's Creator Snuck A Gilmore Girls Reference Into The Show
"That whole monologue was me talking about Gilmore Girls."
Ginny & Georgia’s creator Sarah Lampert is well aware of how often her show gets compared to Gilmore Girls. Although the Netflix series is much more high-adrenaline, leaning into murder cover-ups and melodramatic twists that would never make sense in cozy Stars Hollow, Lampert can admit some of the comparisons are “very fair.” Still, she gets annoyed by how the two shows are brought up together, and she put her own rant about the discourse right into her series.
“The monologue that Maxine gives in Season 2, that whole monologue was me talking about Gilmore Girls,” Lampert tells Elite Daily. She’s referring to Maxine’s meltdown over how her Season 1 musical Sing Sing! was unfairly reviewed by critics. “The Wellsbury Tribune reviewed Sing Sing! as a Chicago rip-off,” Maxine says in the second episode of Season 2. “No, sorry. What they actually said is that they walked into it expecting it to be like Chicago, like a complete rip-off of Chicago. And then it wasn’t like Chicago and they were all like, ‘Wait, what the hell, this isn’t anything like Chicago! I love Chicago. I would’ve liked it if I wasn’t expecting Chicago.’ But they were the ones who said it was going to be like Chicago in the first place!”
Replace Sing Sing! with Ginny & Georgia, and Chicago with Gilmore Girls, and you get exactly how Lampert felt about the first reactions to her show when it premiered in 2021. “Before the show dropped, everyone was like, ‘It's just like Gilmore Girls.’ And then the show came out and they were like, ‘It's not like Gilmore Girls,” Lampert says. “So that monologue is a little joke about that.”
While the Gilmore comparisons can get to her, Lampert does understand why fans can see echoes of their fave 2000s characters, especially when it comes to Georgia’s slow-burn relationship with Joe. Fans frequently point out how the sparks between a free-spirited single mom and a quietly loyal restaurateur feel like a second coming of the Lorelai Gilmore and Luke Danes dynamic.
“That’s totally fair,” Lampert says. “I don’t get bugged by that. I see it, but what I’ll say is the biggest thing connecting [Joe and Luke] is they own the coffee shop. And wear flannels, and the quiet brooding.”
While Joe’s aesthetics match Luke’s now, Lampert hints that the character was very different when she conceived of him. “There was a different Joe in my mind when I first wrote him. But then when Raymond Ablack auditioned, he brought this loveliness to it, and he also has this humor and edge to him. So I pivoted what the character was to cast Ray,” Lampert says.
Ginny & Georgia has already been renewed for Season 4, so here’s hoping Georgia and Joe’s currently up-in-the-air romance follows that same upward trajectory as Lorelai and Luke’s.
