You don't expect Zach Galifianakis to take himself seriously in his new Netflix series — and for the most part, he doesn't. This Is a Gardening Show is loaded with botched takes, tossaway asides and truly terrible jokes, even knock-knock jokes.
Host Galifianakis clearly has fun, and so do his guests. One segment in each episode has him interviewing kids at a grade school, acting like Art Linkletter used to in his very old radio and TV shows. The questions typically revolve around gardening, fruits and vegetables, but invariably veer off into uncharted conversational territory.
Galifianakis proved his ad-lib prowess as an interviewer on his online interview show Between Two Ferns, but the object there was to make his guests intentionally uncomfortable. On this show, whether he's talking to farmers, horticultural experts or little kids, Galifianakis himself always ends up being the butt of the joke.
The six episodes in this first season — I'm hoping there will be more — are devoted to apples, tomatoes, foraging, root vegetables, corn and compost. Zach, who lives in British Columbia, has been gardening for some 25 years. This Is a Gardening Show was filmed on Vancouver Island, and every farmer he visits is a true character.
The director of This Is a Gardening Show is Brook Linder, who also proved his skill at mixing different topics and comic tones in the live Netflix talk show, Everybody's Live with John Mulaney. These gardening shows rely on a basket of tricks. They use time-lapse photography to capture both growth and decay. They use the segments with kids for pure comedy. Galifianakis also visits different farms and farmers to sample their wares, and every time he bites into an heirloom tomato, or a home-grown carrot, he pronounces it the best one he's ever tasted. And I don't think he's kidding.
In the course of these compact 15- to 16-minute episodes, Galifianakis learns how to graft apple trees, make richer compost and generally how to self-sustain. "The future is agrarian," he says in every episode, and not as a punch line. And he points out how happy the Canadian farmers all seem to be as well as how much tastier the locally grown fruits and vegetables are.
In several spots watching This Is a Gardening Show, I became nostalgic for a past I'd almost forgotten. When I was a little kid, my Uncle Tom had a farm-sized backyard, where he grew cherries and tomatoes, and harvested seeds from his hottest peppers each year to keep growing even hotter ones. He also could walk through the nearby forests and confidently forage many types of wild mushrooms, leaving the poisonous ones behind. I also remember a corn farm in Ohio where on harvest day, the farm would set up boiling cauldrons in the fields, and invite the public. You could go there, pick ears right off the stalks, shuck and boil them on the spot, and eat what I still remember was the best corn I ever had.
Galifianakis, in his new series, spreads that kind of joy — for eating as well as gardening. But he issues a dire warning, too, that if we don't return to our roots — the roots in our own gardens — our future may end up being a lot more bleak. That's a bitter pill to swallow, but This Is a Gardening Show serves it up persuasively. And deliciously.
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