Grimm Tidings
Yes I made an awful pun up there.
Can we talk about Grimm? Let's talk about Grimm, because I really like this show, and I want to ramble about why I like it!
(Disclaimer: I am still about 4 episodes behind current for this season, because lol what is keeping up with anything ever.)
So. Grimm. The executive producer is David Greenwalt, whom you may remember from Angel. Grimm has a lot of the same themes as Buffy did--the heroic person who slays the Bad Mean things--but it's a lot more nuanced than Buffy was, in that there's more than just The One or Two Good Bad Guys, at least after the first season. It also takes awhile to get off the ground--almost the entire first season is monster of the week, and the first season also has a really distressing dearth of episodes that pass the Bechdel test--but the monster-of-the-week stuff is still pretty interesting, and it does some decently consistent worldbuilding.
The show is set in Portland, and Our Hero, Nick Burkhardt, is a cop on the Portland police force who suddenly awakens to being a Grimm, which is a person with the ability to perceive wesen (pronounce it like it's German, most of the stuff in the show is named in German) and to fight them pretty effectively. Wesen are basically either creatures from myth, or human-animal hybrid kind of creatures who pass for human but reveal themselves inadvertently when intensely emotional (or can reveal themselves intentionally, but they don't usually, for the same reason that Vampire: the Masquerade/Vampire: the Requiem has the Masquerade, aka "if the humans find out they'll murder us and even if we're individually stronger, there's a lot of them and they'll overwhelm us.") Most of them live normal, if double, lives as citizens of Portland who also happen to have friends with whom they have a lot in common. So the show introduces you to lots of different kinds of wesen, and then as it settles into its groove and starts to have longer-ranging plots, it starts exploring a lot of themes in wesen society and using them as interesting points of conflict.
Nick starts out as kind of a blank slate, but he gradually becomes more interesting as he starts having internal conflict that's not about "wait what I'm a Grimm what's that whoa slow down there." The show is pretty good about recognizing when they are starting to veer into territory of "the more we work to keep this conflict going the more absurd it's going to be" and resolving conflicts before they turn into a laughingstock, while bringing others in. I really like the way that the show and the stressors grow with the characters, becoming more complex and less overt as time goes on.
The show borrows creatures from multiple cultures, having fairly quickly run out of Germanic-based monstrosities to beat characters over the head with, and I think it does so fairly well (although of course I could be missing out on subtext.) I like the relationships that are forming and evolving between the different characters, and I end up laughing a lot in delight rather than in horror. Also, the metaplot (so to speak--this show works very well in tabletop/LARP metaphors, which pleases me) is interesting and the "villains" are not one-dimensional, which is always a great thing.
Anyway, the show has just been renewed and I think that's great, and I think more people should watch it so we can yell excitedly about it.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1109846.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
Can we talk about Grimm? Let's talk about Grimm, because I really like this show, and I want to ramble about why I like it!
(Disclaimer: I am still about 4 episodes behind current for this season, because lol what is keeping up with anything ever.)
So. Grimm. The executive producer is David Greenwalt, whom you may remember from Angel. Grimm has a lot of the same themes as Buffy did--the heroic person who slays the Bad Mean things--but it's a lot more nuanced than Buffy was, in that there's more than just The One or Two Good Bad Guys, at least after the first season. It also takes awhile to get off the ground--almost the entire first season is monster of the week, and the first season also has a really distressing dearth of episodes that pass the Bechdel test--but the monster-of-the-week stuff is still pretty interesting, and it does some decently consistent worldbuilding.
The show is set in Portland, and Our Hero, Nick Burkhardt, is a cop on the Portland police force who suddenly awakens to being a Grimm, which is a person with the ability to perceive wesen (pronounce it like it's German, most of the stuff in the show is named in German) and to fight them pretty effectively. Wesen are basically either creatures from myth, or human-animal hybrid kind of creatures who pass for human but reveal themselves inadvertently when intensely emotional (or can reveal themselves intentionally, but they don't usually, for the same reason that Vampire: the Masquerade/Vampire: the Requiem has the Masquerade, aka "if the humans find out they'll murder us and even if we're individually stronger, there's a lot of them and they'll overwhelm us.") Most of them live normal, if double, lives as citizens of Portland who also happen to have friends with whom they have a lot in common. So the show introduces you to lots of different kinds of wesen, and then as it settles into its groove and starts to have longer-ranging plots, it starts exploring a lot of themes in wesen society and using them as interesting points of conflict.
Nick starts out as kind of a blank slate, but he gradually becomes more interesting as he starts having internal conflict that's not about "wait what I'm a Grimm what's that whoa slow down there." The show is pretty good about recognizing when they are starting to veer into territory of "the more we work to keep this conflict going the more absurd it's going to be" and resolving conflicts before they turn into a laughingstock, while bringing others in. I really like the way that the show and the stressors grow with the characters, becoming more complex and less overt as time goes on.
The show borrows creatures from multiple cultures, having fairly quickly run out of Germanic-based monstrosities to beat characters over the head with, and I think it does so fairly well (although of course I could be missing out on subtext.) I like the relationships that are forming and evolving between the different characters, and I end up laughing a lot in delight rather than in horror. Also, the metaplot (so to speak--this show works very well in tabletop/LARP metaphors, which pleases me) is interesting and the "villains" are not one-dimensional, which is always a great thing.
Anyway, the show has just been renewed and I think that's great, and I think more people should watch it so we can yell excitedly about it.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1109846.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.