First Impressions: NBC’s Grimm

It’s on NBC and it’s not written by Tina Fey. That’s all you really need to know about Grimm, the newest addition to the awful new shows on NBC’s prime time line up. It doesn’t do justice to the centuries of mythology its based on (better known as fairy tales) and without really explaining the point, it leaves Grimm feeling more like a failed low-budget script for a CW or ScyFy series. Add in a complete void of acting talent, a pilot with no apparent visual direction, and a piss poor attempt at a story, and what do you have? Well, just another failed NBC show.

The story revolves around a typical premise: on the same day Nick Burckhardt makes homicide detective, he plans on proposing to his wife, and then finds out his entire lineage of his family is a sham.  Of course, his first murder case is directly related to these revelations, and the pilot just assumes we’ll fill in the rest of the blanks, and believe the whole mess. The main character is poorly acted by David Giuntoli (of Road Rules fame), who has less acting ability than a cardboard cutout of Paris Hilton. He can’t display any emotions, and spends most of his time wearing too much lipstick and making too many ‘I’m frustrated and I want answers now’ faces at other characters in front of the camera. To say it’s a poor casting choice would be a compliment, and when you’re talking about the star of the show, he really leaves nobody else a chance. I guess it would be nice to see a bit more of his partner Hank Griffin, because at least Russell Hornsby has acted on television competently before.

Moving onto the script, it is obvious Grimm is going to follow the typical path of your criminal procedural. Man chases down clues to help someone, bullies a few people, and generally struts around masochistically until he solves the case, gets the bad guy, and gets an ominous clue or two about his past. Yes, this is another LOST clone, whose writers only use generalities when writing expositions, for some sugar-coated attempt at suspense. If I could count the times Nick’s aunt or the innocent werewolf said “you’re one of them” or “they are going to get us”, I’d run out of fingers and toes to keep track by the time the pilot went to its first commercial break. At best, I guess you could compare Grimm to Supernatural – the premises are exactly the same, and since I don’t watch anything on CW, you could’ve convinced me they starred the same person.

Is this show bound to be on television a full season? Probably not, thanks to the awful writing, stock direction, and lack of any substantive plots to generate drama through the first season (and the plethora of terrible special effects makes a nice little cherry). If you can make it to the end of the pilot, enjoy the idiotic and horribly offensive and inappropriate lead up to the climax (yes, I’m talking about the sick portrayal of the antagonist), and its subsequently ridiculous conclusion (complete with ‘twist’), which of course features heart warming music and hopeful notions (“I don’t know how you did, but you did it”).

I don’t know what NBC is doing, but Grimm is not a step in the right direction toward helping their network regain any sort of credibility. Simply put, Grimm is a joke. SKIP IT!