EXCLUSIVE: NBC‘s suburban garden club is shutting down as the network has opted not to renew freshman drama Grosse Pointe Garden Society for a second season.
The news comes six weeks after NBC unveiled the bulk of its 2025-26 lineup, with Grosse Pointe Garden Society, from the Good Girls duo of Jenna Bans and Bill Krebs, as the only 2024-25 series whose fate was left undecided. That is because, as Deadline has reported, NBCUniversal executives wanted to explore the possibility of the serialized drama migrating to streamer Peacock.
After some number crunching, I hear it was ultimately decided that it would be hard for the series to grow its audience on Peacock, leading to the cancellation.
A renewal by NBC had been pretty much out of the question as the mystery drama was a soft linear ratings performer, with its streaming numbers not able to offset that. The show originally launched behind Suits: LA on Sunday. It was subsequently moved to the Friday at 8pm slot, which did give it a modest linear ratings bump but not enough to trigger an NBC renewal possibility as Grosse Pointe Garden Society remained the network’s lowest rated scripted series of the season.
But the move to Friday helped the series’ streaming performance on Peacock, with new episodes of the show available on the platform on Saturday for weekend viewing vs. Monday in the old air pattern. Grosse Pointe Garden Society started popping up in Peacock’s daily Top 10, opening the transfer to Peacock conversation as the serialized series is clearly better suited for streaming.
The show is liked creatively and costs significantly less than a Peacock original drama but still, its move would’ve required financial resources from Peacock that had not been allocated and, with the audience projections not high enough, a pickup by the streamer did not materialize the way Law & Order: Organized Crime was able to relocate from NBC to Peacock last year.
The cancellation leaves fans with a lot of unanswered questions, the biggest coming in the season finale’s big cliffhanger: who was inside that duck costume at the garden club’s Halloween party and what had they done?
This brings the number of NBC scripted series not renewed for 2025-26 to 6, with Grosse Pointe Garden Society joining fellow casualties Suits: LA, The Irrational, Found, Night Court and Lopez vs. Lopez.
Grosse Pointe Garden Society follows four members of a suburban garden club who find their lives intertwined by scandal, mischief and a shared secret – a murder no one wants to talk about. As dark truths begin to rot their lives under the surface, they struggle to remain as perfect as the flowers blooming in their garden above.
It stars Melissa Fumero, Aja Naomi King, Ben Rappaport, AnnaSophia Robb, Matthew Davis, Alexander Hodge, Nancy Travis and Felix Wolfe.
The 13-episode first season launched in February, coming to a close on May 16. Bans and Krebs were co-showrunners and exec produce alongside Casey Kyber. The series was produced by Universal Television.
