The history of television is littered with shows that are photocopies of shows and formats that become the “next big thing,” especially during the network era. How many multiple-timeline tearjerker shows were created in the wake of This Is Us becoming a hit? But it’s rare when we see a show that is a photocopy of a hit from two decades ago, as the newest NBC dramedy is.
Opening Shot: A closeup of the ground at night. A truck pulls up. We see a sign that says “Mack Avenue Garden Center, Grosse Pointe, MI.”
The Gist: Six months earlier, we’re at the garden center in the daytime. In a voice over, a young teacher named Alice (AnnaSophia Robb), who just put up a poster about her lost dog, explains that in a garden club like she’s in, you start to resemble flowers.
She feels she’s a geranium, thriving better when growing in the wild — she wants to be a staff writer at a magazine in New York. Brett (Ben Rappaport), the garden center manager and landscaper, is a dandelion — adaptable, and able to grow anywhere; he has to deal with splitting custody of his kids with his ex, Melissa (Nora Zehetner), who she caught having sex with her Connor (Josh Ventura), whom she later married.
Catherine (Aja Naomi King), the club’s VP, is a zinnia — a hard worker and perfectionist whose husband seems to ignore her, and she’s taken to having an affair with a coworker at her real estate office. The newest volunteer, Birdie (Melissa Fumero), is a lily of the valley — wild and invasive, an author who has had an interesting life and is currently volutneering as community service after crashing her car into a fountain.
As we see the difficulties each of the Grosse Pointe Garden Society members have, we also keep going forward six months, as the four of them bury a body in the garden while dressed in formalwear. They then decide to drive the victim’s car to an industrial site and set it on fire, but someone leaves the victim’s phone inside.
Back to the “present day,” Alice deals with an obnoxious student with a permissive but influential mother and the fact that her dog is still missing. At the same time, she and her husband Doug (Alexander Hodge) are fending off pressure from his parents, Keith (Ron Yuan) and Patty (Nancy Travis) to move closer to them and start a family. Catherine finds out that her coworker is shtupping women all over town and giving them the same bracelet he gave her.
Brett feels that he should be doing more than what he’s doing, especially given Connor’s success as a tax attorney and how competitive Connor is with him for the kids’ attention. And Birdie gives a scholarship to Ford (Felix Wolfe), a middling high school student, but the reasons why she’s doing it are more than just about giving someone a hand.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Jenna Bans and Bill Krebs, Grosse Pointe Garden Society has more than a passing resemblance to shows like Desperate Housewives and Devious Maids.
Our Take: We found the first episode of Grosse Pointe Garden Society extremely annoying, for a lot of reasons. For instance, when we say that the show bears “more than a passing resemblance” to Desperate Housewives, we were being kind. The show adheres to the 20-year-old hit’s format very closely, from inane narration to fast quippy dialogue to having affairs drive storylines.
But where DH was often clever and went in unexpected directions, Grosse Pointe Garden Society feels predictable and tired. Only one of the four storylines had any kind of surprises, and not coincidentally, it had our favorite performance, with Fumero bringing some comic flair and humanity to the seemingly wild Birdie. The other three storylines were less subtle, and everything involving the garden society and their fundraisers feel strangely low-stakes.
What also irritated us was how the show bounced back and forth in time. Instead of trusting the audience and using visual cues to differentiate between “present day” and “six months later,” these two labels are constantly deployed, along with “six months earlier” in the first post-credits scene. It’s really not hard to visually differentiate between the scenes in the “present” and those in the near future: The near-future ones take place in a grey, snowy Michigan winter and are shot that way. The labels just served to confuse us more than necessary.
Also irritating was how we end the first episode not knowing whom the quartet is burying under the garden. Sure, we get candidates. But we just wonder how long that part of the story is going to be dragged out, much less the part where the four co-conspirators strain to keep this massive secret.
Sex and Skin: We get network-level sex, with the most explicit language being the use of “bone” as a verb.
Parting Shot: Alice, in voice over says, “To make a garden grow, something has to die.” We see a shot of a wrapped body in a hole in the garden, which will be dug up to make a koi pond.
Sleeper Star: We’re big fans of Nancy Travis, and like seeing her playing Alice’s overbearing mother-in-law here.
Most Pilot-y Line: Alice gets her clip package back from The New Yorker with a rejection note. First of all: First of all, who sends clip packages when applying for a staff writer position? Second of all, who sends clip packages by mail anymore? Third, if we were an editor and received a packet that had a cover sheet that said “Collection of Writing Samples” on it, we’d reect that person immediately. Fourth, was there a need to put The New Yorker‘s address at the laughable fake address of “365 Gotham Boulevard”?
Our Call: SKIP IT. Perhaps the main characters in Grosse Pointe Garden Society will become more than just cartoon characters and things like the annoying narration will calm down. But we’ve seen shows like this, done much better, for a couple of decades now.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
