• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, February 20, 2025

A new NBC series takes viewers down a garden path to well-tilled soil.

It’s a new series premiering Sunday on NBC about a community of the well-to-do who carry on affairs, keep secrets and pine with unfulfilled desires and ambitions.

In short, it is much like a lot of other shows that have come and gone for decades.

The show is titled “Grosse Pointe Garden Society,” after the community in which it takes place -- a presumably fictionalized version of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, an old, established suburb of Detroit.

Grosse Pointe has appeared previously in the titles of at least one movie and one TV show. 

The TV show was called “Grosse Pointe,” which lasted about six months on The WB in the 2000-01 season.

The movie was “Grosse Pointe Blank” (1997) about a hitman (John Cusack) who returns to Grosse Pointe for his high school reunion.

When a dog is found dead in “Grosse Pointe Garden Society,” one of the characters notes it was shot “point blank,” which may or may not have been a reference to the movie.

However, no hitmen made an appearance in the premiere episode of “Grosse Pointe Garden Society” that the TV Blog previewed on Wednesday.

Except for the killing of the dog, no other creature -- animal or human -- was seen being shot in the episode, perhaps because so many of the characters in the show were so preoccupied having sex with each other.

The TV Blog counted three network-style sex scenes in the first seven-and-a-half minutes of Episode One (plus one or two others before the episode was over).

These kinds of scenes rank high on the TV Blog’s list of TV clichés, a list I may someday share on a day when no other blog topic presents itself.

These are the scenes in which two people (almost always a man and a woman even in the supposedly enlightened times we live in) find themselves alone together somewhere and then lose complete control of their bodies and minds as they strip each other and then intertwine like a pair of Gumbys.

The show is filled with stereotypes -- the hard-partying floozy with a heart of gold, the earnest schoolteacher (who is also the offscreen narrator, another cliché), the entitled, scheming wife of the town’s most powerful man, the wife who gets no satisfaction at home so she has sex with her coworker, the well-meaning divorced dad, the jerk who married the divorced dad’s ex-wife and on and on.

The show is styled like a serial whose overarching storyline has to do with four of the Garden Society’s members doing something ghastly, possibly killing someone (or maybe someone else’s dog), and then trying to live their lives normally while harboring a terrible secret.

In Episode One, the dirty deed is hinted at, but not revealed, so I guess I’ll just have to go on living without ever knowing what happens next.

“Grosse Pointe Garden Society” premieres Sunday night (February 23) at 10 Eastern on NBC.