Pictures courtesy of Netflix / IMDb
This is a Gardening Show is as delightful and as succinct as its title suggests. Hosted by Zach Galifianakis, the series is a funny, warm-as-a-great-blanket look at the world of Horticulture. There are nothing but fun facts, charismatic growers, and kids whose comedic timing gels well with the host of Between Two Ferns.
“This is the kind of easygoing, genuinely fun television that has become far too rare,” Carlo van Remortel wrote in his review. “If there is one downside, it is how quickly it is over.”
Producer Chris Raby describes the show as a “loving ode to gardening.” For him and director Brook Linder, This is a Gardening Show was a project full of potential for natural beauty and good-natured laughs. The duo recently spoke with What’s On Netflix about crafting their big-hearted gardening show.
Did you both know going in just how delightful a lot of these gardeners were going to be, how much warmth they’d bring to the show?
Brook Linder: That was the dream, but Raby had to go find these people.
Chris Raby: We knew the area we were going to and we knew the topics of the episodes. I started digging around in the area and casting as you do with these types of shows. We would reach out and then we would do a Zoom with them. We got the sensibility right away that they’re warm people. We’re talking about stuff that they love. We knew that they’re a good time and they seemed to have a good vibe. And then you throw Zach in the mix and then we hoped magic would happen.
Brook Linder: Well, I feel like there was a concerted effort to steer towards what we’ll call chillers.
Chris Raby: A good hang. I think that’s what we were looking for. And then that’s kind of what the show took on as well. The show is just a good hang with Zach and the new friends he’s meeting.
I’ve heard you guys say Zach doesn’t like to prepare, at least conventionally speaking, but you both have to prepare for him not to prepare, right?
Brook Linder: Dude, inside scoop, Jack.
[Laughs] Please share.
Brook Linder: The night before we shot the pilot a few years ago, Raby and I were in a hotel room. Well, what are we going to do tomorrow? What show are we going to make tomorrow? Chris is like, “We’ll get there. We’ll figure it out..” We had scheduled a meeting with the kids at this time. We had an expert lined up for a couple hours later, but it was very broad. We were kind of like, “Let’s go in and we’re going to see what happens here.” It was a little spooky.
Chris Raby: I think the first thing we filmed is what you see in the opening: Zach sitting in this chair in front of a greenhouse and talking. And so, that was the first thing we shot, those conversations. To what Brook is saying, there’s a lot of questions hanging in the air. And once we were filming and he started to answer questions as a group, Brook and I and our co-producer, Dave Ferguson, then the show started. Everything started to gel like, okay, he’s got this sense of humor, he’s got this point of view. We kept teasing more out of him on camera. And then we go, okay, this will work, this is going to work. And then we figured out how to use those moments, particularly in the edit to highlight that.
Brook Linder: The first episode “Apples,” the beginning of the show, is us asking him, “Hey, what kind of show are we making? And are you hosting the show?” We had a lot of questions, and that’s in the cut. I mean, not us asking the questions, but his answers are in the cut.
You edited the pilot five years ago, right?
Brook Linder: Yeah, it was forever ago.
But when you got to the edit, was it a pretty quick discovery of after the shoot you knew, all right, this is the feeling we’re chasing?
Brook Linder: Pretty much. Well, because once we had shot the segments for that episode, it was like, yeah, that’s what the show is. Raby made this on spec with Zach. Everyone involved with that pilot was really passionate about it; we just feel like we have to do this. We’re coming out of the pandemic. We want to make something that feels good, that is about connecting people on the earth and gardening. It was a passion project without a long-term roadmap.
But there were a lot of questions like, well, did we just shoot half of an episode or is that an episode or how many episodes should we do? It took a while to get together what they wanted for this show and what Zach wanted.
Chris Raby: But I think the building blocks were there in that pilot. Zach’s sense of humor, him laughing, making himself laugh, and making the other people laugh, him intro’ing a topic, but then stumbling his way through it. What we felt is we were able to draw closer to Zach when we left in these kinds of rough edges at times. We left in laughter. We let it drag out. We didn’t hardcut. We didn’t want to clean. We wanted you to see the casualness that we saw on set.
How was the decision to have kids involved to this degree? It’s pretty great.
Chris Raby: When I came on, that was from [producer] Chris Kim and Zach’s discussions. I think Zach has done a lot of kids conversations throughout his career at various points and projects that he’s done. Like he said in some of these interviews for the show, it’s an easy laugh, but for the show, you’re getting the ability to see their perspective on growing. You’re seeing the gardens. There’s just something beautiful about this next generation of gardeners and growing food.
Brook Linder: It makes sense too, because the show is a pretty 101 level of gardening. This is an introduction to a lot. We’re starting from scratch on a lot of these concepts. So it made sense, what is a fruit? It’s a question of the show, and it is also something a child would ask or have a weird answer to.
Brook, you’ve shot music videos for Beck and Spoon [as well as directed John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA]. As someone who’s crafted beautiful images in limited time, what about Vancouver Island really appealed to your eye?
Brook Linder: Vancouver Island has amazing light. The types of music videos that I’ve made are very much using what’s around you – molding your environment and leaning into your environment and trying to make frames out of what’s in front of you. So gardens are… Gardens are laid out horizontally, so it’s difficult to frame up some of this stuff, harder than I thought it would be, especially an episode like “Roots” where the stuff is underground.
But the light was so good on the island, and a lot of the produce was so wet and luminescent. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be, but from the beginning, it felt fun to place little Zach in big frames when we could. We got really lucky with the light a lot of the time. Everything looked very alive in ways that it doesn’t in LA.
It looks lovely. You guys shot the pilot right after the pandemic. What was that experience like, being home and then out in this beautiful part of the world and connecting with nature?
Brook Linder: Well, from a production standpoint, it was very stressful. It was a very scary time to figure out how to put this show together. It was pretty stressful because we’re also going to people’s homes. These people who have been isolated for a year, year and a half are suddenly inviting 12 people to their house, to their yard. It was a weird thing, but I would say we came out of the pandemic with some different goals, like what we wanted to make.
How so?
Brook Linder: I came out of the pandemic with a different perspective and wanted to work on something that had more meaning, basically. It was a scary time to shoot, but it was also a time when we had a lot of fire, a lot of passion to make something of substance. I worked on things that meant a lot, creatively, but this is like a show with a mission. I think we all felt very charged coming out of the pandemic to go into a mission that felt like it was worth something.
Chris Raby: Totally agree. The subject matter allowed for thinking of what are we growing, what are we eating, getting back to food, especially coming out of the pandemic where you’re waiting in grocery lines. It was a gear shift for me that allowed me to find a lot of joy in these discussions with these people either in those pre-calls or when we were on set on set being in their backyard garden. Like Brook said, that was the mission of the show.
Brook Linder: The question in the air was like, is the world ending and what does the future look like? What does the future look like if the truck is not going to bring the apples to the grocery store anymore? Where do they come from?
Chris Raby: We’ve all been isolated. Gardening brings together a community. It’s an ability to share, to grow, to exchange ideas, see. It became a place of community that was aimed at nourishing ourselves, growing our own food. The whole process has been satisfying to – pun intended – grow into what it is.
[Laughs] How did you both land on making these short and sweet 15-minute or so episodes?
Brook Linder: Well, that was a natural evolution. I’m not going to describe this right, Raby, but an episode of SpongeBob is two parts, know what I mean? Cartoons have two things. I think the thought in the beginning was, oh, we’ll do an episode in a half hour and it’ll be apples and tomatoes or apples and foraging.
As we got into rough cuts, like, oh, it’s cool that the kids are there and then the expert comes here, and there’s a little something in between, a little something here. We thought, we’ll solve this problem later – that episodes are only 16, 17 minutes long. Netflix was cool with that. That was so sick. These can just be.
We didn’t have to figure out some weird problem or add a segment or something that would throw off what we felt like was a very chill, cool hang. I feel like if you add another segment, it could become not chill.
Chris Raby: We really try to keep everything to 101 learning and we would fall into 102, 103 levels, but we were trying to keep it concise with simple ideas. We would have a lot of discussions; he and I have those types of things if we’re trending in a direction that’s asking more questions than we really want to get into.
It’s funny, you often hear that from people working on fantasy or sci-fi shows – the more you explain, the more questions you raise. You really are building a world too with This is a Gardening Show.
Brook Linder: Dude, hey, you’d be shocked. Raby, I’m not throwing you under the bus, but he’d pull like, “Hey, there’s a single sentence here with some really cool stuff and it’s eight seconds long. If you just slide it in there, we get two for one on the info thing.” We would slide it in and as a viewer, you’d hone in on that and go, wait, what does that mean? To explain that, you now have to back into another two minutes of how roots work. We’re just like, “Let’s just plant the potatoes and move on. ” There were some gaps–
Chris Raby: That I filled correctly, for the record [Laughs].
Brook Linder: Jack, you have no idea how hard it was to work with this guy. He’s out of his mind.
