There were two huge volumes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in my grade school library and by the fifth grade I’d started reading them cover to cover. These were dangerous stories, seeped in conflict and flowing with blood. Cinderella’s sisters blithely removed pieces of their feet—one a toe, the other a part of her heel—in order to fit into her glass slippers, red dots dripping on the road as each in her turn rode away with the prince. In The Six Swans, a young princess is nearly burned at the stake, unable to defend herself as she can neither speak nor laugh for six years until she completes six shirts for her six princely brothers who were turned into swans by their evil stepmother. One prince with an unfinished shirt is permanently left with a swan’s wing in place of his left arm. The Twelve Dancing Princesses has the “hero” winning his larcenous and lying bride by blackmailing her. One thing is for certain with Grimm’s Fairy Tales: happily ever after always comes at a bitter and significant cost.
My ten-year-old self was shocked, disillusioned, and riveted.
Grimm, airing Friday nights at 9 PM on NBC, takes another turn on these classic tales. Here is a world where the creatures of Grimm’s Fairy Tales are alive and well—and committing crimes. Twisting the police procedural style on its head, every week features a new crime, underscored by a layer of the fantastical as the answers lie deep in the otherworldly.
Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) is a homicide detective in Portland, Oregon whose relatively normal life is disrupted when he starts seeing people’s faces twist into monstrous appearances. A visit from his dying Aunt Marie reveals that he is the last in a line of hunters called Grimms, criminal profilers who keep the balance between the human world and mythological creatures. Because, oh yeah, fairy tales are real. In fact, they’re not stories at all, but rather a manual on how to identify and fight the monsters. These supernatural fiends have infiltrated the world and, as the last Grimm, it’s now Nick’s job to hunt down the monsters and protect humanity.
With the ailing Aunt Marie dead by the second episode, it’s up to the big (not-so-)bad wolf to act as Nick’s guide in this fantastical world. Literally, as Eddie Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell), a Wieder Blutbad, or werewolf-esqe being who has gone vegan, quickly becomes Nick’s inside man—er, creature. He brings the funny to the show, alleviating the constant tension (who next will turn out to be a monster?) with random asides and snarky rejoinders. It’s like Buffy being trained by a reformed Spike without the sexual tension. Only not as boring as that may sound.
Grimm marries the horrors of real life crime to the creeptastic aspects of the fantastical with chill-inducing results. In the pilot episode, a young girl is kidnapped by a pedophile who is also a Blutbad; his twisted psychosis forces him to abuse children but his monstrous nature makes him kill and eat them. In episode four, an unattractive man lures beautiful women to his bed and breakfast, only to imprison them in his basement. This might seem a better plotline for Criminal Minds, but in Grimm the kicker is that the villain is a Ziegevolk, a Pan figure; these women go to their cages willingly, hypnotized by his power. When Nick sends Eddie in undercover, the reformed wolf is swiftly, and comically, sucked under the spell as well.
And of course we have a big bad here: none other than Nick’s boss, Captain Renard, a hunter of the hunters, whose true motives are slowly revealed week to week.
As the Grimm mythology unfolds, each week brings a new story, and creature, to the forefront and with 170 tales in the Grimm lexicon, the source material seems endless. The dialogue sparks and the pace is swift as Nick (and the audience) falls ever deeper into the grim underbelly of this new and increasingly bizarre world.
Standard procedural shows weary me. They’re too easy to solve and, without resonating characters, I find them increasingly dull and insipid. Grimm has enough of an edge, of something new, to intrigue with some supernatural curve balls thrown into the procedural pattern. This is a great time to get caught up in it too; a double dose of the show airs this week with a new episode on Thursday (12/8) at 10 PM followed by another new one in its regular time slot of Friday (12/9) at 9 PM. Have no fear either that this is a genre show destined to fail on network TV; Grimm has already been picked up for a full season.
If you ever wished fairy tales were real, if you ever wondered what lived beneath your bed, if you for one moment thought there could be some truths in those long-ago tales of the brothers Grimm, then Grimm is the show for you.
Kiersten Hallie Krum is a writer of smart, sharp and sexy romantic suspense. By day, she is senior editor for a pharmaceutical advertising agency and freelances as a back cover copy writer for genre fiction. By night, she is many other things. Follow her twitter handle @kierstenkrum for daily doses of her off-kilter lack of wisdom, more of which is available on her website www.kierstenkrum.com, on her blog www.twolftshoes.blogspot.com, and at www.facebook.com/kierstenkrum.
