By my count, 80% of all new American television shows center around the idea that old European fairy tales are real. OK, just two but if these are hits, you know there will be more. In one of them, back in the olden days, Snow White, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood existed and all belonged to the same book clubs and bowling teams until curses were tossed about like movie theater popcorn and they were all yanked away from their fairy tale kingdom into the living hell of having good jobs and decent lives in an idyllic New England town. Yes, I know, I’m not sure what sort of diseased mind thought that one up either. But I want to talk about the other one called Grimm.

This takes the buddy cop formula and gives it the twist of one of the buddies having a superpower he has to hide from the other one so he has to farm some work out to another buddy (in this case, a mystical creature) who shows up on an as-needed basis and knows all about it. The lead character is a cop who finds out that monsters from fairy tales are real and that only he has the ability to see them because he’s part of a family/ancient order/Facebook group called the Grimms.

                             Not much to look at but she has a great personality.

I have several objections to this show but the big one is that the whole first hour was a big lump of joylessness. Is that a word? If not, remember it was created here. Anyway, it was just depressing. This guy discovers he’s now an integral, important part of an impossible world and his response is to walk around blank-faced and worried it will cost him his fiance. I compare it to Spider-Man. Peter Parker pays a heavy price for being Spider-Man. The burdens and responsibilities he’s had to shoulder have hurt his relationships with family and girlfriends over the years and he has to struggle by on the wages earned by a freelance reporter even though he could be making millions if he wanted to use his powers selfishly. His reward for all of this is that he absolutely loves being Spider-Man. He loves being able to lift cars above his head while practically flying around New York City skyscrapers plus he gets to help people who would be injured or even die if he wasn’t there. He loves doing this and being what he is more than he can say which is why watching his story unfold in print and on the screen isn’t an exercise in clinical depression.

The guy in Grimm, on the other hand, had no sense of wonder or joy over who and what he was and, because of that, neither did we. He did get a brief moment of satisfaction when he saved a little girl before going right back to his sad state of being stomped by supernatural creatures while having friends and coworkers think he’s a weirdo because he can’t tell anyone what’s going on.

I suppose it’s possible he could settle into his new life and start to gain some sort of benefit from it in future episodes but I’m not particularly inclined to watch future episodes so I may or may not see those and, if the show does get good, it won’t mean this first episode wasn’t bad. Still, if watching Bergman films in which all the characters are two dimensional and speak in stilted dialogue is your thing then Grimm just might be the show for you.