Grosse Pointe Gardening Society: Heterosexuals garden, have affairs, and murder someone. With a hung Hodge and Wolfe wang

 

Don't you hate it when you subscribe to a streaming service for one movie or tv show, and then find nothing else of interest?  We just finished Paramount Plus for Twin Peaks, and now we've in Peacock for Wicked, Nosferatu, and since I'm trying to watch everything from Adam Devine, the hottest guy on the planet,  Break Point.  Done. But I'm not going to spend $18 a month to watch three movies, so here's a review of Grosse Pointe Garden Society: one of the garden-society members is male, gardening is gay-coded, so surely he'll be gay.

Note: Grosse Pointe is an affluent suburb of Detroit.  It just means "big tip," as in tip of land, in French, but it sounds funny. 

Prelude: The gardeners dump a body into a hole they dug. The four stories are interspliced, but I'll separate them to make the plots easier to follow, and give them nicknames: From left to right, Entitled, Pink Hat, Male Gardener, and White Hat.

Pink Hat's Story: Six months earlier, a park area with a lot of flowers. Pink Hat puts up a "lost dog" flier on the community bulletin board and narrates: "They say people look like their dogs, but when you're in a garden club, you're more like the flowers you plant." She begins unloading geraniums, but the Snippy Leader tells her that they're not good enough to win the award this year. 

"I think I'd be a geranium," Pink Hat continues, flashing back to smooching with her underwear-clad boyfriend (they don't unclench long enough for a screen shot).  Then to her high school class, where they're discussing the Romantic Poets (that's the Romantic Era, 1790-1830, not "romance').  She hates it, although she does gaze lustfully at one of the Hunkoids (Christian Finlayson).

Cut to Hunkoid's Mom coming in to complain about her son's grade -- "D on a poem?"  He copied the lyrics to a Kenny Lamar song.  So why not an F?    Mom threatens.  

In other news, Pink Hat's application for a job at the New Yorker has been rejected. 

Later, Pink Hat and boyfriend (Alexander Hodge) have dinner with his parents, who criticize her writing ambitions and his job painting restaurant signs.  They want them to move into their rental property, four bedrooms and two baths, for when you have children.  "You know the heterosexist trajectory: job, house, wife, kids?  Have some kids, already."

Pink Hat doesn't thnk she wants kids, which horrifies them."  But...you have a uterus...

After the horrible dinner, Pink Hat meets Male Gardener outside a garage to drink.  He reveals that they found her missing dog -- she's dead.  At least it doesn't die on camera.  Someone shot her!  Pink Hat seethes for revenge.

At school, the Hunkoid who plagiarized his poem drops by to explain: "That song moved me."  White Hat isn't impressed.  So does this mean that you'll stop lusting after him?  "So why did you give me a D?  D means dick. You think I'm a dick."

He approaches threateningly, and hints that because she "got personal," he killed her dog.

Seething, Pink Hat complains to the Principal: "He's rude, disrespectful..." Arrogant?   But the Principal won't expell him, because his parents are rich: they built the lacrosse stadium, the library...well everything.  "We work for them; they can do what they want."

Left: Hung Hodge

So she accosts Hunkoid's mom at the beauty parlor and says that she's reconsidered his grade: now it's an F, "because you've failed him as a parent."  That's not a good reason.  "Your son killed my dog."  Not a good reason either. 

Cut to Pink Hat being fired for standing up to the rich people.  Hunkoid drives up in his new car to gloat. 

Potential Victim: Hunkoid or his Mom

Male Gardener's Story: He's Ben Rappaport, top photo, introduced talking to Pink Hat about cars: "Coyote-V8 with dual Blistein shocks. It's the exact '66 Bronco I restored with my Dad"  What's with the car talk at a garden club?  Are the writers trying to prove that this guy is "a real man," that is, heterosexual?

Pink Hat tells us that Male Gardener is a dandelion.  They can grow anywhere.  Cut to him bringing his two toddler kids to "see Mommy."  Heterosexual identity established at Minute 2.14, unless you count the car talk.  He bursts into the office to find Mom "pollinating with another flower," har har.   So they broke up, and now he's gazing longlingly at Pink Hat.

In the present,  Male Gardener drops off the kids at his ex-wife's elegant Tudor.  But he has them for two more minutes, so he forces them to stay in the car, while they complain and ex-wife and Current Husband (Josh Ventura) glare at him.  

Left: on his Instagram, Josh Ventura claims that he's one of these guys, the stars of the tv series Satisfaction.   His followers commiserate over having a guy lying next to him; that must have been awful! 

But he not actually in the photo. They are Family Man Matt Passmore and Blair Redford as the hustler his wife hired.  Josh appears in just one episode.

Back to Gardening Society: Male Gardener waits in the back yard, glaring, for the kids' clothes to be washed and dried (by the ex-wife, naturally). In other news, Husband is speaking at his kid's career day.  Male Gardener offers to do it, but they say "Don't be silly, you have an awful job."  But it's Ex-Wife's fault: she promised to stay home with the kids while he started his car restoration business, but then she had an affair and cancelled the deal.  

Male Gardener and Current Husband compete to see who can throw a football at the son (into sports, like all "real boys."  Annoyingly gender polarized).  

Later, Male Gardener is driving with his kids, when he callously drives by a stalled motorist, even though he's a skilled auto mechanic.  Then he thinks, this might be a way to prove that he has a bigger d*ck that Current Husband, so he turns around and helps, blabbing car trivia and grunting.   The Motorist wants to thank him somehow.  Male Gardener grins.  No, of course he doesn't have that in mind.  No gay people in this universe.

More after the break

"Surreal Estate," Episode 1.1: Realtor and his scoobies investigate haunted houses, with gay characters and a lot of n*de Matt Whites

  

Surreal Estate (2021-23), on Hulu, appeared on Reddit about shows with "normalized" LGBT characters, not struggling to come out or fighting homophobia.  None of the episode synopses suggest gay characters, and the icon shows a man and a woman, but here goes, Episode 1.1

Scene 1: Night. A man in a 1940s detective costume walks through a thunderstorm to a creepy house. The sign says "For Sale by Owner." 

Inside, it's too dark to see much, but a woman in a bathrobe seems to be reading an antique book on human anatomy.   She gets scared when the surgeon in a photograph seems to be grinning evilly at her.  Suddenly the room catches on fire (at least we can see something now).  She runs outside, but runs into the Old Fashioned Man.  

Psych!  He's not the ghost of a 1940s detective, he just dresses like one: Luke Roman (Tim Rozon of Schitt's Creek), interested in the house.  So call in advance?  

She hugs him: "The house wants to kill me!"  That's every home owner's complaint, girl.

He can help with that.  They gaze into each other's eyes.  I'll be they start dating, and she joins the paranormal real estate team.

Scene 2: At Shirley's Diner, still too dark to see much, Homeowner Megan, says that her fiancé is coming to pick her up.  Don't you hate it when they mention a boyfriend halfway through the date?

Luke shows her a video about his company, SMEP, Specialists in Metaphysically-Engaged Properties, those with a market value depreciation due a tragedy occuring there.  Sometimes they are haunted, sometimes not, but the rumor makes it lose 37% of its market value and takes 317% longer to sell. 

Megan's swishy boyfriend Brock (Matt White) flounces in with a teeth-click, a flamboyant wave of his umbrella, and a "What up, Girlfriend?"  Shouldn't be too hard to convince him to be true to himself, so you can have Megan for yourself.  

Matt White has nine acting credits on IMDB, including six shorts,and three walk-ons.  This may not be the right one, but there are lots of other Matt Whites to choose from: a baseball player, a football player, an artist,  a musician, a comedian, and a billionaire.

Left: Matt White d*ck

Scene 3: At the agency, Luke tells his scoobies, two men and a woman, about the case.  Homeowner Megan is a medical student who inherited the haunted house from her grandfather.  Swishy boyfriend lives with her (in his own room, I assume).  

On to otheir other case, a house with a poltergeist. It came out clean: no entities.  But Rita, the Evil Realtor who hired them, insists that things were flying around.  Nobody wants to confront her because she's so evil, so they get the New Girl to do it: a ringer who got $10 million in sales at her last agency.  

Introductions:

Father Phil (Adam Korson, right), a defrocked priest with nice biceps, does the background checks and due diligence.

More after the break