Grosse Pointe Garden Society “Pilot”
Created by Jenna Bans
Written by Jenna Bans & Bill Krebs
Directed by Maggie Kiley
Airs Sunday nights on NBC
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a close-knit town full of quirky personalities and long-held secrets is thrown into chaos when a community member is mysteriously murdered, a story that begins in media res with a shot of an anonymous dead body before flashing back to a more serene time in the recent past. From Desperate Housewives to Big Little Lies to Twin Peaks to each season of The White Lotus (a bit of a stretch, but not really), “murder in a quirky, moody small town” premises have become almost secondhand, a sea of increasingly forgettable stories about scorned women, shitty men, and the professional and personal grudges and regrets that define their lives (with, you know, a little sexy action thrown on top, for good measure).
The success of these encapsulated soap operas, of course, is wildly inconsistent; those that do find their audience, especially on network television, often do so by embracing a combination of earnest, horny, and strange all to their own, engaging with an ability to ground itself in characters that remain interesting, even amongst a sea of silly narrative bullshit (The O.C.‘s early seasons are a great example of this, though nobody dies until the end of season two, of course).
Grosse Pointe Garden Society, NBC’s latest foray into the genre, makes no qualms about its adaptation of the familiar format; from the opening scene where we see our protagonists burying an unknown body, to the cascading set of archetypal characters and premises – and touch of Stepford Wives panache that’s sprinkled on top for good measure – the latest drama from Good Girls creator Jenna Bans (alongside Bill Krebs) is full of the domestic, professional, and interpersonal political hallmarks of the genre. And though the first episode is a little too safe with its characters, and way too erratic in its delivery, Gross Pointe Garden Society could be one of the better, more enthusiastic attempts to recapture the magic of the works it is clearly influenced by – it’s just not there yet.
Spread out across two distinct timelines – “Present” and “Six Months Later”, phrases cleverly inserted into background objects during each transition – Grosse Point Garden Society‘s first hour is crammed to the brim with anticipatory plot twists and an appropriately angsty set of lead characters. Of course, the series focuses its attention in on a specific foursome; Alice, the small town teacher with big city dreams (an underutilized AnnaSophia Robb), the socialite-turned-convict doing her “rural” penance (Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s Melissa Fumero), undersexed real estate agent Catherine (Aja Naomi King) and Divorced Dad Brett (Ben Rappaport).
There’s an impressive attempt at building out the backstories and conflicts of these main characters in the process of introducing the show’s central set of mysteries (which also involve a secret adoption, a dead dog, a dramatic custody fight – and of course, the happenings of the actual garden club, which feels mostly like an afterthought in “Pilot”). While there aren’t a whole lot of interesting wrinkles thrown into the introduction of these stories, the collection of them provide a decent foundation for the series to build a soapy, even pulpy little hour-long drama out of – though unfortunately, all of them are a shade too tame for anything to gain meaningful traction.
It’s a shame “Pilot” doesn’t play more to its extremes; there are hints of a more unhinged, passionate series creeping around the edges (a disgruntled lover pulling a gun in the front seat of his car is the closest we get), one that throws logic to the wind and uses its insane whirlwind of stories to dig deep into its characters and their inner workings. But Grosse Pointe Garden Society is too rigid and unwilling to let itself loose at any point – which is expected of a Big Three pilot to some degree, but even network counterpart The Hunting Party was willing to flirt with the idea of being batshit crazy in its first 42 minutes a little bit, even as it flung tired cliches and shitty dialogue at the audience in every scene.
To its credit, Grosse Pointe Garden Society is certainly a more buttoned up, engaged series than The Hunting Party – one even willing to indulge in a bit of humor, which it would do well to lean further into as its mysteries begin to unravel in front of the audience. It also helps its one of the more visually appealing new series of 2025, trading in the beiges of Prime Target and the like for impeccably bright pastels, bringing personality to its characters through their costumes and surroundings in ways that are not exactly revolutionary, but help to distinguish itself a bit where its narrative struggles to.
And that’s really where the fault line lies for Grosse Pointe Garden Society; the delivery of the show’s story, which plays out like a Dan Fogelman series on a meth binge. “Pilot” isn’t necessarily impossible to follow, but its constant bouncing back and forth between its two timelines (spoiler: it later introduces a third “past” time in subsequent episodes) never allow it to gain any momentum in either time. What concerns me is how much “Pilot” seems enamored with its own pacing, each transition giddy to introduce another vaguely undefined variable to the many branching narrative paths leading to the events we see in the “six months later” version of the timeline. It just snaps back and forth too frequently, in a way that betrays the thin construction of its character arcs and still-hidden plot twists; in its worst moments, it feels like a series trying to dance a little too cleverly about revealing its story, doling out breadcrumbs at a glacial pace while it whips around from story to story at lightning speed.
Grosse Pointe Garden Society has a bit of time to figure this out; it’s not like NBC’s dramatic lineup has been going wild in the post-This Is Us era, so if GPGS can even endear a mildly-sized audience to its (what are hopefully increasingly wild) shenanigans, it’s not hard to see this series getting a quick second-season renewal. However, if it can’t rein in some of its more frustrating narrative tendencies, or if it can’t find more interesting ways to engage and develop the personalities of its main characters, Grosse Pointe Garden Society could easily become another in a long line of misfires trying to imitate the lightning in a bottle of ABC’s former ratings juggernaut, left in its lasting shadow alongside so many other forgettable short-lived series of the past twenty years.