It’s a Grimm World

Season 1, episode 1: “Pilot”

The much-anticipated pilot for the new series “Grimm” aired last Friday. Spoiler alert: if you have not seen the episode some of the details will be given away here.

“Grimm” is an interesting world of the usual and unbelievable. Marc Buckland directs this mixed cast of characters. At it’s most basic “Grimm” is a police profiling story. The twist is that Nick Burckhardt has just come to his gift (or curse, depending on your view) of being able to see beneath the facade of the creatures around him.  His lack of reaction to this revelation is one of the most unbelievable aspects of this story line. He takes it in stride as though this is no more unusual than a long headache that won’t respond to aspirin.

“Grimm” has assembled an interesting cast that I hope to see given great material from the writers.  The show needs to develop the characters and draw in the audience quickly.  They have made some good starts in Monroe and Hank, Nick’s police partner who obviously trusts Nick despite his odd tactics. Hank had some one liners to deliver in the pilot that he managed to pull off. Monroe is a reformed bad creature. I think this relationship has great potential. My favorite scene was Monroe driving with his head out the window of the car to track by scent while driving.

My biggest peeves with the show was the lighting design,  the inconsistent look of Monroe and just that it tried too hard to be scary. The lighting was super saturated with color, blues, reds, and orange. It takes away from the reality of the show and makes it more like a spook house at Halloween time. I would like to see the hues of the light more subdued and realistic. I expect that Monroe will either settle into a consistent look or that was already worked out with in the pilot.

On trying too hard to be scary, if the show goes with more realism it would be scarier. When design aspects are pushed so far from reality then it looses that “this could happen to me” feeling. It started with Nick taking it so lightly that he could see the creatures around him. As an audience we take our cues from the lead characters. If Nick does not see a problem with a tongue flicking … thing sitting in the police station the audience is being told that is not so very out of the ordinary. Then the show has to push much harder to get a reaction from us where we are supposed to feel danger.

For a pilot, “Grimm” did not give a lot of expository information. I am not sure if that is a good thing or not. Time and more episodes will tell if that was a good choice or not. I thought it was an interesting choice that Monroe gave us as much of the background information as any of the characters. Monroe is my favorite character so far, can you tell? He is the only one that had interesting stuff going on. Nick is rather boring. Hank might become more interesting. Juliette is the loyal fiancee, and I am taking that from the show’s web site. You can’t actually tell from the pilot that she is loyal. You can say that she is more willing to declare her love than Nick. She says “Love you” to him when they part and he goes to the hospital with his Aunt.  Nick turns and walks away with out reply. Ladies, that is never a good sign.

Grimm introduced a lot in this opening. There are characters that we do not know but got a glimpse of. There is the world with in Aunt Marie’s trailer, sinister characters at the end of the show and things I am not sure if we will see again or not. I look forward to seeing the cast of characters develop. The preview of the next episode looks to be filled with action. I hope we also get more character development. In the end this show will make it if they can give us interesting and compelling characters and a good story.  Leave the colored lights for the carnival.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/MYnUJ-3DliU]

[Official Show Site on NBC]