First Impressions: “Grimm” tells tales we’ve heard before

Let’s face it: Friday night is hardly the slot a show wants to start out on – particularly if it’s competing with shows of the same genre in the same time slot. This is one of the huge challenges that NBC’s new show Grimm faces. It’s a fantasy drama that revolves around the idea of fairy tale legends being based in fact, and the people whose job it is to keep them at bay.

These are hardly new ideas. Secret warriors who fight to keep humanity safe from dangers they don’t know about, generations of families with the same, burgeoning responsibilities, monsters that walk among us – all of these are popular ideas in a modern fantasy setting. But I’ll stop dancing around the comparison I want to make and just get it out there: the show reminds me strongly of the CW‘s Supernatural from its direction to the premise, and perhaps even more obviously, ABC’s Once Upon a Time. It’s not necessarily a bad thing – I personally have always had a soft spot for good looking people fighting off the unknown – but they definitely tread familiar territory. I have yet to see what really makes Grimm stand out from the rest, and I don’t see it ending happily ever after.

Grimm has had a surprising amount of hype for a Friday night show, and it hasn’t really lived up to any of it. Our hero’s name is Nick Burckhardt, played by David Giuntoli, a cop with Clark Kent-esque good looks, a bland personality, and a bright future ahead of him with a wonderful girlfriend. In the pilot, a series of missing and dead girls leads him and his partner, Hank (Russell Hornsby), on the trail of the perpetrator.

As the premiere goes on, it becomes more and more apparent that things aren’t what they seem for poor Nick. Monstrous faces appear on passers-by. His aunt Marie is attacked by a creature wielding a scythe. As he gets deeper and deeper into the case of the missing girls, he discovers that one of the suspects is a blutbad – think werewolf but not – who helps him find the girl and identifies him as a Grimm.

Which tells us next to nothing, because the writers of the show seemed focused on finding the girl caught by the monster of the week more than establishing a foundation for the series. In scattered bits and pieces, we’re able to gather that Grimms are a line of human warriors, tasked with hunting down fairy tale creatures. Nick’s injured Aunt Marie tells him that their family has a terrible secret, gives him a key to a trailer filled with weaponry and journals documenting the legendary creatures, and mumbles a few odd sentences about what Nick must do. Nick spends a couple of scenes digging around the trailer late at night. The monsters react to him accordingly in conflicts, addressing him with a shocked “Grimm!” every time they see him, in case we’ve forgotten what he was. But none of it digs deep enough into Nick’s Deep Dark Family Secret to make me give a damn.

Viewers learn virtually nothing about Nick as a person. Sure, his parents are dead, he’s a cop, he has a girlfriend – but everything he does is unfortunately flat or purely reactionary. He sees things others don’t, but seems nonplussed by it. He reacts with expected disbelief when he finds out he’s speaking to a reformed werewolf blutbad – who doesn’t eat children. Even the final confrontation, when he finds the location of a missing girl, seems unimportant. He’s a character without much personality, or even a true sense of humor, and his partner doesn’t do much to improve affairs.

The monsters themselves aren’t much better, though the blutbad Eddie Monroe has the promise of being a not entirely terrible humorous sidekick. The lore, which is emphasized strongly by NBC as a critical part of the show, is barely explored; we learn that blutbads are the original Big Bad Wolves, but learn nothing about how they came to be, why Grimms fight their kind and other monsters, and so forth. If this were the midseason show for an established series, this would be par for the course, but when a show is just getting its sea legs, it’s inexcusable. I don’t know about you, but I need to know a show to care about it. I feel like I know nothing here.

Earlier, I drew the comparison between this show and Supernatural, as well as the obvious parallels with Once Upon a Time. Unlike either of these shows, Grimm seems to take itself entirely too seriously, on top of its numerous other flaws, particularly for a show that finds its basis in fairy tales – even the Grimm variety. The show was almost entirely without jokes, the cops without humor or charm. While this was never meant to be a feel-good show, it’s too light on the scares to be a true fantasy TV horror, so what is its place, exactly?

Consensus: It’s hard to really get a read on Grimm from this episode alone because… well, nothing really seems to happen that we haven’t seen already. The lead character is flatter than the pages fairy tales are printed on, the plot of the pilot is two-dimensional in its best parts, and it takes itself far too seriously. It had the potential to explore fairy tales in the same dark ways as its titular namesake, but does so without any finesse, grit, or real intelligence. I think I’ll be sticking to shows with more content and less pretty pictures.

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