The Snapping Turtle: Ginny, Georgia, Storytelling, and Representation
- Ryan C. Tittle
- 27 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Whether I’m entitled or not, I am encouraged more and more to express some thoughts I would have previously never considered posting. It is my own blog, after all. Some of this will be hard for folks to take, but it comes out of a deep respect for the makeup of our nation and an even deeper respect for dramatic storytelling. When Netflix premiered Ginny & Georgia, it was divisive from the start. Because its subjects dealt with teen self-harm, poverty, race, and just about every other cause being fought for in an activist world, few paid attention to what mattered: the storytelling.

I follow many theatre companies on social media and some Hollywood “news” accounts. They want, very seriously, in a decade’s time, to make up for hundreds of years of oppression, an idea so idiotic as to not even consider with any sincerity. Hollywood has much to apologize for (The Birth of a Nation is both the great synthesis of early cinema and one of the most horrible sociological documents of all time). The theatre has much less to apologize for. It has craved diverse voices since its earliest days. Yes, there were no paid female playwrights until 1660, but if you consider the fact that Sophokles and Shakespeare were (at the very least) partly homosexual, we have been have never been a homogenized group. In the 20thcentury, we welcomed Anita Loos and Lillian Hellman between the Wars, Amiri Baraka and Lorraine Hansberry in the ‘60s, David Henry Hwang and Frank Chin in the ‘70s-‘80s and not a single person who looks like me has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in eight years.
In the post George Floyd and #metoo era, there are many thoughts drilled in our heads to make us believe illogical things: that silence is violence, that our differences are more important than what unites us, and that representation, above anything else, is more important than almost anything.
There is actually an old Jewish concept (in the Talmud) that, in the midst of a mourning (even mass tragedy) silence is the appropriate response. And someone not speaking ever hurt anyone as much as a weapon. We are descending further and further into a tribal nation. We have never been more divided in ideals, in outlook, in a sense of our future self. America is still, relatively speaking, an adolescent nation in its petulant teenage years. It is true we have sins for which we can never be forgiven, slavery being the most prominent, but not the only one. Lastly, representation is important. Just not as important as great art.

The late Professor Harold Bloom was derided by almost every outlet for his 1994 masterpiece The Western Canon, in which he defended (mostly, but not entirely) dead white authors without whom we would have no great literary foundation in the West. He spoke against replacing Cervantes with third-rate writers in course syllabi just because they represented a neglected group. And, despite his identity as a Jewish man, he was called everything but the prophet he was of the times in which we are now living (this is not uncommon among Jewish people—they are considered “white” and, therefore, less than in some circles) despite their being slain scapegoats during most of their time on Earth.
Ginny & Georgia’s first kerfuffle was a line about “Opression Olympics,” which sent the internet into a frenzy. And yet, the only identity or ethnicity not represented on the show might be a snapping turtle. Its main character comes from the poverty-stricken South (a group that no one has ever given a damn about), the other main character is biracial and self-harms, Ginny’s brother is on his way toward Generalized Anxiety Disorder, their neighbor family includes a lesbian, a teen struggling with addiction and depression and a deaf father; the local coffee shop owner is Indian-American; Abby (played by the remarkable Katie Douglas) deals with body dysmorphia and is exploring her own sexuality, Norah is both adopted and of Asian descent; there are also characters who have been on life support, who have been bullied, the list goes on. If a show could ever make a comment about the Oppression Olympics, this is the one. In no corner of the world is such a concoction of people communicating on a regular basis. Even in the world of Ginny & Georgia, we still primarily focus on the relationship between Georgia and Paul, the standard “white” couple and Ginny’s African American friends are a separate group that never interacts with her other group (called MANG).
[The second controversy was an innocent joke about Taylor Swift’s myriad number of exes. To criticize her is to be called misogynist (and she fully played into this in her social media feeds, criticizing Netflix itself—a great waste of time).]
Now, one might say, “Isn’t that wonderful? Our country is so diverse and inclusive!” Yes, that is one of the many great things about this country. But G&G tries much too hard to create a world that, given the multiple illnesses affecting almost everyone, you would never want to be a part of. It is true that mental illness among teenagers is rising. Whether that is some part of evolution or the madness of our age, or an over-exaggeration of something that’s always been true, it’s best left to social scientists to figure it out (if you can call sociology a science, which it isn’t because the factor of bias is too great).

Oh, Ryan, but what about the young deaf person who sees themselves represented onscreen in perhaps one of the most touching performances (the father of Max)? Yes. Again—wonderful—and if it weren’t pitted against a multicultural fairy tale, it would be a delight. The truth is, in the real world, we are growing further apart than closer together. I am not a strict realist, but for a show that is produced as naturalism, one wonders if the choice of representation over storytelling is anything natural at all.
I have just completed the third season of the show. In some ways, it has lost almost all the joy that was present in the first two seasons. Part of this is the nature of the plot (Georgia’s trial), but I remember when I thought Max was one of the most interesting characters on TV, I remember the uncontrollable laughter from Georgia, I remember feeling Ginny’s pain in a palpable way. In this season, which is plotted so scattershot that the trial is even mishandled by the writing staff leading to an anticlimax and an overly long denouement in the final episode, every episode felt like it lasted 3 hours as we plumbed further and further the depths of our differences.
Perhaps I will never catch up to today’s society. Sometimes, I wish I would have never seen the 21st century with its various methods towards progress that are actually regressions into infinite adolescence. I grew up in the early ‘90s (back when the newly termed “political correctness” was merely a benign cyst rather than the malignant tumor it is today) and I learned all the respectful terms and treated them as sacrosanct. My generation grew up with shows where “tokenism” played a large part in the casting of extras on sitcoms while the families in these shows themselves remained homogenous. Unfortunately, even though they were 30-minute sitcoms with no sense of reality, they were more true to life than G&G which aims to please everyone and will eventually satisfy no one, especially if it continues on this track waxing and waning on character and avoiding the finer points of storytelling.
Maybe my biggest fear is that, one day, when we’ve all inter-bred, we will find other ways of hating each other, much like the Sneecthes on the beaches from Dr. Seuss’ immortal poem. But the fear for now is that we are overcompensating for slights in our past. It’s called the past for a reason. There are still treasures in G&G; sadly good dramatic episodic writing is slipping away as we make way for the next in line to be represented. The snapping turtle awaits.
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