From Bridge to Terabithia to Soul Surfer to Rebel Ridge, AnnaSophia Robb‘s filmography continues to impress us. Now starring in the new NBC drama Grosse Pointe Garden Society, Robb couldn’t be more excited about playing Alice — a woman whose life starts to spiral after her beloved dog is found murdered. Things only get messier when she and her three Garden Club pals commit a murder themselves — and bury the body in their friendly neighborhood garden.
For some background: Alice starts the series as an English teacher in Grosse Pointe, MI with dreams of becoming a writer and moving to New York City. Sound familiar? Back in 2013, Robb famously led a little ol’ show called The Carrie Diaries, a Sex and the City prequel that followed a young Carrie Bradshaw as she moved to the Big Apple and began her career as a writer.
“It’s not the first time I thought about it,” Robb told DECIDER when we speculated that Alice might be living the life Carrie would’ve if she had never moved to Manhattan. But unlike Carrie, Alice is hunkered down in a small suburban town with her husband, Doug (Alexander Hodge), whose parents have been pressuring her to put her dreams aside and start a family.
“Alice — she’s always dreamed of coming to the city and fulfilling her dreams. But life just hasn’t gone that way for her. She hasn’t made those big leaps and sort of bet on herself,” Robb said. “And so she’s in this place where does she take that big step? Or does she stay put in her hometown?”
As we see in just the pilot episode, Alice’s life is upended when she and her friends Catherine (Aja Naomi King), Birdie (Melissa Fumero), and Brett (Ben Rappaport), on the night of a fancy gala, kill someone and bury them in their Garden Club’s garden. The show’s dual timeline has us asking so many questions: what happened in those six months between the present-day scenes and the night of the murder? Why are they in ballgowns? And WHO did they murder?!
For Robb — who only recently found out the answer to the last question — her character’s almost immediate downward spiral was “really fun” to play. It all starts when she learns her dog was murdered and is quickly led to believe the killer is an obnoxious student she gave a bad grade to, which ultimately gets her fired from her job when his equally as obnoxious mother steps in. Six months later, Alice somehow winds up covering up a murder of her own.
“All of a sudden I’m reading the episodes, I’m like, ‘Oh, wow. And then this happens. Oh, wow,'” Robb said. “Somebody killed her dog, and then there’s a murder, and they’re just trying to survive. It’s like normal people in extreme circumstances. And that’s where a lot of the comedy comes from, is like, how did they end up in fancy dresses and ballgowns burying a body in a garden? How did that happen? And they are sort of asking themselves also like, ‘How did we get here? Why do we have to do this?’ So it’s a fun journey and mystery to get there.”
Many fans have likened Grosse Pointe Garden Society to shows like Desperate Housewives, Big Little Lies, and even Pretty Little Liars — which would make sense since, as Robb pointed out, showrunner Jenna Bans worked as a writer on Desperate Housewives.
“It has very much like that flavor of — it’s this sort of ideal, like, pretty world on top and then dirty on the bottom, which is yummy and salacious,” she said.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a show like this — and Robb is well aware of that.
“I think we all kind of feel the same way,” she said, noting that while Grosse Pointe Garden Society is certainly”fun and fresh,” it also has that “nostalgic” feel to it that’s reminiscent of the aforementioned shows. “It was a show that when I read it, I was like, ‘I would want to watch this.'”
New episodes of Grosse Pointe Garden Society air Sunday nights at 10/9c on NBC.