In the era of Severance, Yellowjackets, and The White Lotus, every show is a mystery-box show, inviting—or demanding—its audience actively watch the proceedings, concocting theories about the symbolism and foreshadowing hidden within the disjointed narrative.
Answers are deliberately kept in shadow and climaxes are hinted at but never seen until the finale episode, yet there’s always the sense that the show is leading up to something big. The lengthily titled Grosse Pointe Garden Society, NBC’s new dark comedy about a group of part-time community gardeners caught up in a soon-to-be-deadly crisis, follows the pattern: At a certain point, someone must die. The only thing left to find out is who.
School teacher Alice (AnnaSophia Robb), hotshot realtor Catherine (Aja Naomi King), wealthy socialite Birdie (Melissa Fumero), and divorced dad Brett (Ben Rappaport) are longtime friends in the service of their hometown gardening club, which is in charge of prettying up a nearby community garden for the coming spring’s local contest. It’s one thing to deal with the club president’s authoritarian flower-planting edicts, but it’s quite another to navigate the troubles the four are having in their personal lives.
As established early in the pilot episode, each of our main characters is on the outs with someone hell-bent on making their life difficult, whether it’s a bad student who may or may not have killed their dog, or a sultry business partner who’s been buying other women the same bejeweled bracelets. By the end of the season, as tense flash-forwards would have us believe, one of these adversaries…will die!
There’s a certain Big Little Lies or Desperate Housewives lilt to the whole thing (unsurprising, as one of the show’s co-creators, Jenna Bans, was in the Housewives writers room), peeking under the sheen of the charming middle-American small town to find the rot that lies beneath—much like the flowers in a garden live off the death and decay of their fellows.
There are lots of garden metaphors and plant fun facts that the narration (from a different character every episode) uses to skewer its heroes. (The show doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the other project that put its eponymous city on the map, John Cusack’s hit-man comedy Grosse Pointe Blank, aside from the fact that, at some point, one of the characters in this show is going to kick the bucket, either on purpose or by accident.)
This sort of mystery-building surprise time jump feels like the kind of thing that almost every drama show is doing nowadays, which is fine—it’s a device that works, and in this case the jumps into the future have even more comedic acidity to them than the rest of the show. Plus, they’re often marked by blink-and-you-miss-it “six weeks ago” or “moments later” time indicators cleverly nestled into posters or signs already onscreen. It’s this playfulness that suggests that there’s more to what’s going on here than a simple small-town murder-mystery riff.
The future killing, though, is secondary to the main tension of the show as it follows its characters as they deal with the secrets taking over their own lives. Robb and King are particularly fun to watch, but all four are given time to wallow in that anxious soup, forced to remain buttoned up on the outside while breaking down under the strain of a litany of personal situations—divorce, infidelity, parenthood, students who plagiarize Kendrick Lamar lyrics—about as dramatic as they come.
The Pleasantville archetype of a surface-level perfect environment masking something terribly wrong underneath is always fun to see, and Grosse Pointe Garden Society feels like the kind of show that could turn into must-watch appointment TV, if allowed to fully bloom.
