'Grosse Pointe Garden Society': Has Time Jumping Jumped The Shark?

I need better brain elasticity to watch TV these days. Some of this season’s hottest new shows have been employing time-hopping gimmicks to tell their stories in non-linear ways. This is fine, but I’m beginning to wonder if some of them are using this narrative device to cover for poor or confusing writing.

Hulu’s Paradise did a good job with it this first season. A lot of the back and forth between the world-shattering events that forced the population underground and the current mystery was relevant. But I question why we needed to know so much about Sinatra’s past. Were they trying to engender sympathy for her? Julianne Nicholson (August: Osage County, Law & Order: Criminal Intent) played her as ruthless and borderline psychotic, and I loved it. She is a terrible person with far too much power and I don’t care how she got that way.

Netflix’s Zero Day (#seriesthatshouldbemovies) also plays with time, but in a more psychedelic way. De Niro’s President Mullen suffers from auditory and visual hallucinations throughout the series. Maybe they’re visions? Maybe he’s been dosed with some sort of chemical weapon? Or maybe he’s just old and has a lot of regrets. I don’t remember there being a definitive answer to that question. Regardless, it’s some confusing timey-wimey nonsense that, for whatever reason, employs “Who Killed Bambi?” by the Sex Pistols to add another level of whatthefuckery to it all.

Even Daredevil: Born Again started the season with a traumatic event and then time-hopped a year into the future.

Grosse Pointe Garden Society, the new NBC/Peacock drama about the intersection of privileged lives and murder, might be the worst offender in the way it plays with time. The show is positioning itself to be the next Desperate Housewives. The vibe falls somewhere between that and Veronica Mars. In the first episode, the show was as confusing as possible, moving from “Present Day” to “Six Months From Now,” to “Six Months Ago” after every scene, with every time change indicated by signage worked into the scenery. About halfway through, I lost track of what the present day was.

I decided to check out the second episode to see if they ditched the device. They did not. And, while I love Melissa Fumero’s (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Blockbuster) portrait of the saucy, morally ambiguous, rich divorcée/influencer/author Birdie on Grosse Pointe Garden Society, I’m worried it’s going to collapse under the weight of its timeline shenanigans.

The show is narrated by AnnaSophia Robb’s (The Carrie Diaries) young, idealistic teacher, Alice. She has a problem with one of her over-privileged students, who may or may not have shot her dog as an act of vengeance after a bad grade. She describes everything, and everyone, in gardening terms.

Aja Naomi King (How To Get Away With Murder) is Catherine, who was cheating on her husband with her boss. Until she found out her boss was cheating on her with basically every other woman in Grosse Pointe. Now they’re locked in a battle of wills to see who will destroy each other first and most thoroughly.

Rounding out the cast of garden club members is Ben Rappaport (Younger, Outsourced), a divorced father of two, whose ex-wife and new husband are making his life miserable by flaunting their money and success in his face.

Two episodes in, and we have these four co-conspirators and a dead body. Whose dead body? I don’t know. No one knows. They’re buried in the garden, wrapped in a rug. For a minute during the first episode, I thought I knew who the body was, but then time hopped again, and I thought it might be someone else. By the end of the second episode, I had changed my mind again.

The showrunners probably think they’ve got a great watercooler show on their hands and are anticipating viewers spending the season unraveling all of the time shifts and clues as to the identity of the dead body. But there aren’t watercoolers anymore, and tying time into knots will only act as cover for so long if the story isn’t strong enough to stand on its own. I’m willing to give Grosse Pointe Garden Society a chance on the merit of its cast (Melissa Fumero has my support in all things), and the possibility of the story being worth it in the end. Even allowing for the headache of all the time travel, it doesn’t seem like a show that will sustain further seasons. How many bodies can you bury in a community garden?

New episodes of Grosse Pointe Garden Society air Sunday nights on NBC and stream the next day on Peacock.