ANN MARIE BALDONADO, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. On Earth Day, Netflix launched a six-part series called “This Is A Gardening Show.” It’s hosted by Zach Galifianakis, the comedic actor best known for the “Hangover” films, the TV series “Baskets” and his own acerbic talk show “Between Two Ferns.” Our TV critic, David Bianculli, says that while this series is just as funny and delightful as you might expect, it’s also surprisingly informative and even serious. Here’s his review.
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ZACH GALIFIANAKIS: This is a food gardening show with your host, Zach Gaspafadoski (ph).
DAVID BIANCULLI, BYLINE: 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, toss away asides and truly terrible jokes, even knock-knock jokes. He 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.
The host proved his ad lib prowess as an interviewer on his “Between Two Ferns” show. 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. Here he is chatting with a series of kids as he tours their school garden. Somehow, the conversational topics shift from ghost peppers to the movie “School Of Rock.”
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: These are ghost peppers.
GALIFIANAKIS: Are they haunted?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: No.
GALIFIANAKIS: Well, then why do they call them ghost peppers?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Because they’re really hot.
GALIFIANAKIS: But most ghosts aren’t known for being hot. If you could be anything in the world that you wanted to be, what would you be?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I want to be a vet.
GALIFIANAKIS: You don’t mean a veteran – you mean a veterinarian?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah.
GALIFIANAKIS: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Probably somebody who works in a show.
GALIFIANAKIS: Works in a show?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah.
GALIFIANAKIS: Oh, like, show business stuff?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah. Like, have you ever seen “School Of Rock”?
GALIFIANAKIS: Who is that with?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Jack Black.
GALIFIANAKIS: Never heard of that guy.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: He’s one of my favorite actors.
GALIFIANAKIS: Good for him.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: No, my first favorite is Ryan Reynolds.
GALIFIANAKIS: Ryan Reynolds. It’d be nice to meet an actor one day.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah. It would be nice to meet Ryan Reynolds and Jack Black.
GALIFIANAKIS: Yeah. You ever heard of this guy Zach Galifianakis?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah.
GALIFIANAKIS: What do you think of that guy?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: He’s not my favorite.
GALIFIANAKIS: Hmm.
BIANCULLI: 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, especially Murray, who’s been growing corn for about half a century and easily handles any question thrown at him, even when Zach brings up the phenomenon of crop circles.
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GALIFIANAKIS: Anybody ever come in here to try to do a crop circle?
MURRAY MCNAB: No. Any idiot with a center point and a rope can make a crop circle.
GALIFIANAKIS: But you don’t think they’re aliens?
MCNAB: No.
GALIFIANAKIS: They’re just drunk kids doing it.
MCNAB: No, old people with a piece of board. You’ve probably seen it on TV.
GALIFIANAKIS: What do you mean old people? By that, meaning…
MCNAB: Well, like, our age.
GALIFIANAKIS: Our age?
MCNAB: Well, you’re like 70-ish.
GALIFIANAKIS: (Laughter).
BIANCULLI: In the same episode on corn, an actual food archaeologist is brought in. And while you’re likely to learn something, it’s always with a smile.
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UNIDENTIFIED ARCHAEOLOGIST: Food is one of the topics that I study in archaeology, and we began to find corn in an ancient village site that we were working at in Chiapas, Mexico. We took samples of that carbonized corn…
GALIFIANAKIS: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED ARCHAEOLOGIST: …And sent it to a radiocarbon laboratory.
GALIFIANAKIS: How old was it?
UNIDENTIFIED ARCHAEOLOGIST: Over 3,000 years old.
GALIFIANAKIS: Wow. Older than Murray.
UNIDENTIFIED ARCHAEOLOGIST: (Laughter).
BIANCULLI: 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, he 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, even Murray, 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. Zach 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.
BALDONADO: David Bianculli reviewed “This Is A Gardening Show.” Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, tech writer Joanna Stern. She spent a year relying on AI to do everything in her life that AI could do for her like diagnosing her mammogram, responding to messages, folding her T-shirts and serving as a boyfriend. She’ll tell us what she learned about AI’s current capabilities. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what’s on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram – @nprfreshair.
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BALDONADO: FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I’m Ann Marie Baldonado.
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