Grimm's Tales

I turned away from the final World Series game temporarily the Friday before Halloween to catch NBC's new show, Grimm, and I've got to say that I love this comedy/fantasy/cop drama.  In fact, this is the only new show that I've sampled that I enjoy.  David Giutoli plays Nick Burckhardt, a homicide detective descended from the Grimms, a group of hunters who seek out and destroy evil fairy tale creatures like blutbotten or blutbaden (big bad wolves) and jaegerbears (hunter bears).  Burkhardt begins seeing these creatures, who look like normal humans to everyone else, when his dying aunt shows up and her grim gift is passed on to him.

Set in Portland, Oregon and its Black Forest-like woods, Grimm's first two episodes have riffed on both Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  In the pilot, girls in red sweatshirts are being kidnapped and/or murdered by a big bad wolf.  Assisting Burkhardt are his partner Hank Griffin (Russell Hornsby) and reformed big bad wolf Eddie (Silas Weir Mitchell) who makes cuckoo clocks and keeps his inner wolf down through "a strict regimen of diet, drugs, and Pilates."  When he first meets Burkhardt, Eddie tells him, "My folks used to tell me stories about you guys.  Scared the hell out of me when I was a kid."  Unbeknownst to Burkhardt, his boss, Captain Renard, is a Grimm reaper, one of the hunters of the hunters.

In last night's episode Burkhardt had to save a young man and woman from a family of jaegerbears.  The victims, Rocky and Gilda, had entered the bears' abode, eaten their food, and slept in their beds.  When surprised by the arrival of the family, Gilda escapes out of the window, but Rocky is kidnapped by Barry, the bear family son.  Later, Gilda is also captured when she goes back with a gun to rescue Rocky.  Barry and his two friends, who look like skinheads, plan on letting Rocky and Gilda escape so that the three young bears can hunt them in the woods before ritually sacrificing them.  When the detectives come poking around, Mother bear tells the detectives to remember that "we're the victims here" echoing Eddie's sentiment that to the fairy tale villains, the Grimms are the bad guys.

This show is fun:  part fairy tale, part NCIS, and I love some of the details.  The first red-shirted girl to be attacked by a big bad wolf is running through the dark woods of Portland and lured off the trail by a little Hummel figurine.  Both big bad wolves in the pilot episode drive VWs, the reformed wolf a bug, the not-so reformed wolf a microbus.  The bears' house is decorated with bear paws and carvings. With the two most obvious fairy tale villains out of the way, it'll be interesting to see where Grimm goes from here.  Grimm airs right after Chuck on Friday nights at 9 p.m. EST on NBC.