Season 3 of Netflix’s hit show “Ginny & Georgia” is on its way, and though the details of the genre-defying series (Is it more of a coming-of-age thriller? Or maybe a comedic crime/family drama?) are still under wraps, it’ll no doubt start with our titular antiheroes in trouble. After all, Georgia (Brianne Howey) was arrested for murder at the end of Season 2, and in the middle of the first dance at her wedding to Mayor Paul (Scott Porter) no less. Paul so far seems like a genuinely good guy compared to most of the creeps and scammers who’ve previously found their way into Georgia’s life, but with Georgia’s legal problems, they’re still far away from their happy ever after.

Ginny (Antonia Gentry), meanwhile, is enduring her own struggles. In addition to her mom finding out about her history of self-harm, Ginny spent Season 2 starting to go to therapy, dealing with a racially insensitive English teacher, and getting dumped by Marcus (Felix Mallard), who’s also dealing with depression. Luckily, Ginny is a super-capable kid (the New England-set show has more than a few shades of “Gilmore Girls”) who now knows most of the gory details of her mom’s past, and the pair’s honesty with one another will hopefully help them out of trouble in Season 3. Not everyone knows about Georgia’s past, though, as she’s been outrunning her traumatic childhood for years. Along the way, she’s also been outrunning her former identity: Mary.

Though the name Mary has rarely been spoken so far in the show, the character has been with viewers since the beginning. Quite so: Mary is actually the name assigned at birth to teen Ginny’s young mom Georgia, who we learned had an extremely rough childhood in the show’s pilot episode. Shown in flashback, the younger version of Georgia is played by Nikki Roumel, and we see that she endured abuse and left home at a young age, joining a biker gang in the process.

As Georgia tells Ginny in Season 2, she was abused by her stepdad throughout her childhood, and she finally ran away at age 14. After spending some time homeless and in jail, she ended up having Ginny when she was just 15. Her traumatic adolescence left her overprotective of Ginny — and prone to doing reckless stuff like, you know, killing people who might hurt her daughter. “I took all the darkness and I ate it,” Georgia once told Ginny while coming clean to her about her past. “I became, like, freakin’ Bane. So that you, my daughter, could live a good life.” The name Mary itself comes up in “Ginny and Georgia” Season 1 when Georgia’s half-sister Maddie (Kelly McCormack) shows up at the house calling her by her birth name.

There’s a good reason the show hasn’t used the name Mary much; in the very first episode of Season 1, we watch as the abused teen decides to change her name to Georgia, a move she never looks back from. She makes the decision on the day she runs away from home, when she stumbles across the Blood Eyes biker gang (with whom she will later commit crimes, “Riverdale”-style) while hitchhiking and one of its members asks her name.

Hoping to make a clean break from the past and reinvent herself, 14-year-old Georgia looks towards a sign on the border between Georgia and Alabama (the alleged source of her corny accent) and makes a quick decision. She becomes Georgia and stays that way for the rest of the series, even though she changes her last name several times as she continues to run from the crimes of her past.

The list of people who know Georgia as Mary is short, but Ginny discovers her mother’s former name and confronts her about it in Season 2. “We’re all such a happy family: you, me, Paul, Austin, Mary,” Ginny says pointedly in front of Georgia’s clueless fiancé, mayor Paul. The mention of the name sends Georgia into an emotional tailspin, but it eventually leads to her coming clean to her daughter.

Aside from Ginny, the only people who seem to know about Georgia’s former name are her family members, including Maddie, her cruel and predatory step-dad Ed (Geoff Scovell), and her mom, Daisy (Kiran Friesen). She also comes clean to Paul about several aspects of her previous life, but she leaves a whole lot of details out. Let’s not forget that, again, Season 2 of “Ginny & Georgia” ended on a cliffhanger where Georgia was arrested for murder at her own wedding. Do the cops know about her previous identity? It’s too soon to tell, but they seem to be focused on more recent crimes she committed under her current name.

Speaking to Netflix’s Tudum about her character’s past in 2023, Howey said that Georgia has had to “keep reinventing herself, create an even more tangled web of deception and keep it all together over and over again, ever since she was a child.” The move from Mary to Georgia is a clear starting point for her deception — the first reinvention.

In a conversation with Glamour in 2023, Howey also said that the layers to Georgia’s character are what made landing the role “an opportunity of a lifetime.” As she put it:

“Georgia is on the run. She’s living in all the grey areas of her life. There’s nothing black and white about her. She has these very complicated love triangles. And the most defining characteristic about her that blinded me to everything else was that she’s a survivor. She’s overcome so much. She’s been through so much. She’s so complicated and dynamic.”

Series creator Sarah Lampert has also shared her thoughts on Georgia’s messy past, telling Creative Screenwriting in 2023 that she’s “not interested in characters who are always right or always wrong.” She acknowledged that both Ginny and Georgia have flaws, and that “their flaws give them room to grow. Nobody likes perfect characters.”

“Ginny & Georgia” Season 3 is due out on June 5, 2025. The first two seasons are currently streaming on Netflix.