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It's like Columbo, only with things that go bump in the night. Really...?
Universal / 990 Minutes / 2011-2012 / Unrated / Street Date: August 7, 2012
Grimm as a genre-fied cop drama works all right, but its premise is so Young Adult-meets-Law & Order that silliness trumps good old-fashioned murder mystery every time. It's a tough dance for fantasy and sci-fi fans these days: there's a renaissance of them, of sorts, seeing that Twilight and Harry Potter continue to make ghosties and otherworldly demons cool somehow, but bad fantasy/sci-fi is particularly hard to swallow, and you can go ahead and call Grimm exhibit A in that regard.
For those not familiar with the series, here's its secret: detective Nick Burkhardt (David Guintoli) isn't just a Portland crime solver - he also has the ability to sense the presence of Wesen, the monsters we've all read about in fairy tales (hence the show's title). Through this Season One set, Nick has to play two hands - on one side, he's trying to clean up the streets of the Pacific Northwest, and on the other, he's trying to maintain an equilibrium between light and dark so that us Muggles don't know that a Wesen army is nipping at our heels.
Grimm isn't a patently bad show, I guess. Again, once each of its episode-long mysteries begins, the ensuing drama is well-oiled enough that one wants to see where things will end up, but it's difficult to throw any major fandom behind a show like this. Its Supernatural cop drama aims might have looked good on paper, but as a genre crossbreed, this one doesn't quite deliver.
That being said, it continues to fascinate that fantasy on TV is okay again (if it ever has been). It seems as though our sparkling vampire universe has even made nighttime programming safe haven for shows like Grimm or Once Upon a Time or even Supernatural (which still is able to hang on to its time slot). I'm absolutely for more sci-fi/fantasy on the boob tube, but if it's really going to stick, the source material has to be better than Grimm.