Surfing Sci-Fi: Grimm

 
There’s been a lot of talk this TV season about the “rivalry,” or whatever you want to call it, between two new shows on NBC and ABC, both of which appear to take “fairy tales in the modern world” as their starting point. ABC’s Once Upon a Time is a big old mystery show from a writing team that worked on Lost, with a large backstory and frequent “flash-sideways” interspersed with the action. NBC’s Grimm, about a cop who starts fighting fairy tale creatures, may seem on the surface to be somewhat similar. However, it’s definitely a completely different TV series.

While Grimm does seem to aspire to have some sort of mythology, it is for the most part a procedural. There’s a murder or what have you, the cops investigate, the perps get caught, etc. The difference between this show and, say, Law & Order is that the perpetrators are secretly weird creatures taken out of fairy tales, part wolf or part bear. The stories in Grimm’s Fairy Tales are actual historical records, we’re told, and there really are Big Bad Wolves out there that occasionally lose control and eat a girl dressed all in red.

There is a lot to like about Grimm, and just as much not to like. The setting, a foliage draped Pacific Northwest, is visually evocative, and the cinematography plays this up as much as possible. This sounds like fainter praise than it is, but there are many other technical aspects of the show I enjoy, including the score and the sound design. There’s also a side character, a reformed Wolf who decides to help our hero (he apparently doesn’t eat little girls due to his rigorous Pilates regimen or something), who is loads of fun. There are some other fun performances, as well.

However, the show’s huge failing (or one of them anyway) is forgetting to have a character at its center. David Giuntoli, who I’m told got his start on reality TV (and who my mom continues to insist is actually Brandon Routh), plays Nick, a Portland homicide detective who suddenly starts seeing weird things and turns out to be a Grimm, by which this show apparently means someone with the ability to see through the human facades of fairy tale creatures and down to what they truly are. Nick is pretty much the most whitebread, boring person imaginable, as far as I can tell. He has a fiancee and is kind of freaked out by his new powers. He’s also apparently a decent guy. That’s pretty much all I know about him, and I’ve watched two episodes with Nick in most of the scenes. He doesn’t seem to have, y’know… traits.

That’s somewhat surprising, considering the two writers on the pilot are David Greenwalt and Jim Kouf, who used to work together on Angel and did a great job making a relatively one-note protagonist into someone who a) felt like a real human being and b) seemed like someone worth hanging out with on a weekly basis. With the exception, as I said earlier, of a couple of side characters, Grimm doesn’t really give me a reason why I’d want to spend an hour a week with these people.

Also dragging things down a peg occasionally are the show’s special effects, which do manage to recall the heyday of Buffy (you knew I’d work it in somehow, Tiarra), but not in a good way. When the show relies on practical make-up it comes off as low-budget and cheesy, and when Nick sees faces do these quick CGI morphs into evil animals the effect isn’t much better. There was one moment in the show’s second episode where a dude’s face turns into this computer graphics bear-person face and I almost cracked up.

One positive I did notice is that the show seems to respect the audience’s intelligence more than it really has to, which is nice. The pilot episode’s case-of-the-week is a modernistic child-abduction-y take on Red Riding Hood (with more iPods than the original) and the second episode is a similarly updated version of Goldilocks (in which our heroine attempts to do her boyfriend in the bears’ bed, among other impositions). However, nobody ever says “This is just like Red Riding Hood.” We get it, but the show never feels the need to rub our face in it. And while some shows wait a while to go down the time-tested “not all monsters are evil” road (Supernatural’s just getting there now, and it’s Season 7), we see as early as the second episode that some of them are just trying to hold down their desk jobs and keep their heads down, while others are rather insistent on chasing people through the woods. Which Portland conveniently has a lot of. Now, if we could just have Nick question himself every once in a while, we’d be golden.

I’m not sure why there’s a glut of fairy tale-related TV shows and movies these days, but I do think Grimm deserves to be considered outside of that discussion. The series does a lot of things well, and I honestly had a good time watching the pilot, in particular. However, unless it figures out how to make Nick into a character, a lot of the other aspects may end up being for naught. That said, if you like procedurals and you like fairy tales, Grimm will probably still turn you on. But how big is that demographic?
 

About Dan

Dan Joslyn grew up in Ohio but now lives in Las Vegas, NV with his lovely ginger girlfriend, Tiarra, where he works as an office monkey. He enjoys reviewing movies and television for the site, and over-analyzing such things. He may be the Chosen One… but he probably isn’t.

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