Grosse Pointe Garden Society: Set Secrets

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The killer new drama Grosse Pointe Garden Society has now officially been put to rest by NBC with news of its cancellation dropping over the weekend. This quirky show followed four flower frenzied friends through the death and cover up of a mysterious victim nicknamed quiche. Although this show had its fans, NBC decided to pull the plug, ending the rumors of a possibility that the show could be renewed for a second season that would go straight to streaming on Peacock. I worked on this show as an extra over a few episodes and in this video we are going to go over some little known secrets about the show that are absolutely to die for!

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First off the series was mostly filmed at Assembly Studios in Atlanta which is probably my favorite studio to work at. Why is this important? Well that is because almost every exterior scene was shot at the studio. The studio is special in that productions filming there have the option to make use of the property’s grounds in lieu of traveling to another location to film some exterior scenes; for example the front facing sections of the studio’s sound stages are covered with a veneer to make them look like regular buildings along a city block. This is useful because this street can be used for shooting outdoor city scenes without having to travel very far from your main filming location. If you keep this in mind while watching and you have a keen eye you can spot many of the front areas of the studio in most of the episodes. Driving with quiche in the trunk - that’s the main road that turns into the studio, the parking garage used for valet and kidnapping scenes? That’s just the studio’s normal parking garage! Alice and Doug’s fight about him possibly shooting her dog? That is the fence opposite the main road in front of the studio. In fact just about every time they are driving downtown they are using this main road and if you look carefully in some shots you can even see the Assembly sign, but it is just turned off so it doesn’t pull focus since that would be far too obvious that they are not in Grosse Pointe. The outside shots of the garden and gala were also shot back behind the studio and oddly enough the shoe store where uncle Gary ends up working? That is actually in the back foyer of the studio’s guest entrance right past the check-in desk. All they did was dress it up by bringing in a lot of shoes and other accessories to make it look like a trendy shoe store, which explains why this particular store has a random staircase in the middle of it. It really is amazing what you can do with a few potted plants, stands, tables and things to cover all the windows.

Most of the rest of the show was shot on the sound stages there, but some were shot at other locations. For example the hospital and brett’s kids school were not only shot at another location, but it was the same location and to get from one to the other you just had to turn a corner and go down the hall and voila from hospital to elementary school in seconds. It may sound strange to do that, but this is a fairly common way of salvaging older empty buildings in Atlanta that can be used as a set. You just set up some areas to look like commonly used locations like schools, hospitals and jails and then rent them out for a few days instead of building it all from scratch. This is also why many hospital scenes look very similar, because there is a good chance many of them are shooting at the same location. If they don’t shoot many hospital scenes they won’t waste time building their own set. So now you are probably going to ask me if they did that then why did they bother to build a coffee shop, and several restaurants just for one season and sometimes barely use them for more than one episode? Well they did a really neat trick with this one - many of these scenes were shot on the exact same set, but they would change out the interiors for whatever business it had to be that day. Basically if you see them shooting indoors and see a brick wall, then that means that they are probably shooting in the coffee shop and they just switched out the interior decorations so they could reuse the same frame and walls. Also I am not 100% sure, but I believe people on set were saying that the coffee shop is actually a one to one replica of the real coffee shop they used in the pilot, but that they just built it from scratch on set to make filming easier. This replica coffee shop was also directly across from the Garden Center where Brett worked and was right next to Brett’s apartment since they were all built inside the same sound stage.

Now let’s talk a bit about the Gala and the Garden. So the Morocco under the stars gala according to the show is in a tent that was put up next to the garden with the entrance starting from the end of the garden’s trellis. In real life they did put a tent up outside the garden in that location, but this was only for the outdoor scenes like when people were checking in or when Marilyn was waiting for the valet. Although they did put up a real tent for these shots, it was actually just used as storage or to hold extras. The actual interior shots of the gala were on set where they put up a similar tent inside a sound stage and just matched the interior parts that could be seen from the outside. This was important because shooting outdoors is a bit harder since it is less predictable and the more control you have over filming the better. In fact when we were shooting the outdoor sections for episode eleven, we were actually shooting in the winter and although it was Atlanta, we still had to deal with cold temperatures, wind and freezing rain. During the valet scene the weather was so bad that I had to use my jacket to help block the wind and rain from ruining Jennifer Irwin’s costume. It was absolutely miserable and there were not enough space heaters or hot hands and there were almost no breaks where you could try to warm up and by the end of the shoot I had to basically stand over a space heater to try to thaw out my hands and feet. It was a physically painful experience and I loved every minute of it. But the one good thing was that snow on the ground in the garden? Not real snow… it came from a spray can, so at least that wasn’t making things worse.

This was by far the quickest show I have ever been on in terms of the time it took from filming to being published and by a good amount. To give you an idea of how fast it came out relative to some other projects: I still have several shows and movies that I filmed well before this show that still haven’t aired yet and I mean quite a few that were filmed in the summer and fall of last year. The first day I was on set for GPGS was in mid November for episode three, which aired on March 9th, less than four months later. That is crazy fast and I was able to see myself on the show on TV while we were still filming the later episodes as that week we just happened to be filming the gala scenes for episode 11. It is hard to describe how surreal it feels to be able to watch yourself on a show while you are still filming it. Now it is pretty common for tv shows to still be filming while earlier episodes are airing, especially if the season is very long, but the show only had thirteen episodes so it definitely wasn’t something I was expecting to experience.

Well that is about it for Grosse Pointe Garden Society. I had a lot of fun on set and it really was a great time working with a very professional cast and crew. It is sad that it won’t be getting a second season as the whole production had a family vibe that isn’t always present on set. Thanks for watching until the end and if you have any questions, have any topics you would like to see or have any thoughts on what we can do to improve, please let me know in the comments. I am Frank Cioppettini with Servetty Software and I will see you in the next one!