Zach Galifianakis has made a six-part gardening show that treats dirt, compost and tomatoes like material for a comedy set, then quietly turns around and makes a case that how we grow food may decide a lot more than dinner. This Is a Gardening Show runs six 15-minute episodes, with Galifianakis hosting a series that opens every installment with interviews with children and moves from jokes to actual lessons without warning.
The comedian, described here as a longtime gardener who started growing peanuts after moving to Los Angeles, says the future is agrarian and also admits he knows barely anything about gardening himself. That blunt mix gives the show its odd pull. In the first episode, he plays a true-or-false game about apple varieties, later visits a sun-dappled tomato farm to learn which tomatoes are most likely to survive the climate crisis, and meets a composting expert along the way. The series also sends him foraging, where he wonders aloud, "Will this devastate my bowels?"
The show was directed by Brook Linder, who last year gave Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney a distinctive look, and it leans hard on visual invention to keep the lessons moving. Small animated tracts break in with historical notes about produce, while time-lapse photography is threaded through the episodes to show growth in a way a lecture never could. The result is less a standard gardening how-to than a beginner-friendly crash course disguised as a joke machine.
That balance is the point, and it is also where the show’s friction lives. One segment called Bobbing for Turds pushes the absurdity, while the review says the children invariably fall in love with Galifianakis. But the same review says Murray, a grizzled corn farmer, cuts against the comic optimism with profanities that undermine Galifianakis’s claim that gardening makes everyone happier. The show keeps trying to make peace between those two ideas: that planting things is funny, and that food production sits inside a real climate emergency.
By the end, This Is a Gardening Show lands on a simple answer to the question it keeps asking in stranger and stranger ways: yes, it is funny, but it is also trying to teach viewers that gardening is not a hobby on the side of the story. For Galifianakis, it is the story.