The Grimmoire: That Voodoo We Do So Well

It's as if Richard Avedon unaccountably showed up to take prom pics. Maybe you believe the event means less than nothing, maybe you despise fashion shutterbugs on principle, but, at the end of the day, you're not throwing away the photos. You look too damn good. The showrunners adore our fair city, that much is clear, and, in their way, they might even understand us. However derivative the plotlines and shitheaded the dialogue, few network staples could so flatter our guiding urban mythology.

While Leverage was a vastly superior show by most any standard of conventional entertainment, asking Puddletown to play the part of Boston never made much sense, and the final season's official move to Portland (effecting no notable change in filming, save donuts arriving in pink boxes) beggared reason. For a gang of high-end thieves targeting international financiers, we offer little beyond an array of atmospheric riverfront used as backdrop for negotiations with minor league power brokers. Grimm, for all its faults, knows the most interesting creatures in these parts lurk underneath the bridges.

Technically, the series details the adventures of one Nick Burkhardt, PPD detective and heir to a genetic predisposition enabling Nick to spot the menagerie of animalistic beasts called "wesen" that live among us. His bloodline are all called Grimms, apparently. Were the brothers Grimm Grimms? Perhaps. Who knows?

But even considering the tried-and-true genre device of presenting the most wooden and two-dimensional character as central figure, the Grimm isn't really the point. Technically human, despite an expressly canine cast to his features (if plasticene, as a  Playmobil black lab), Nick is a vividly incurious suburban-style straightjohn. In defter treatments, the wesen would remind our hero of some essential quality of mankind's primal origins surrendered through the infernal bargains of civilization, but that would necessitate a hero who notices things.  

Grimm interprets the wesen as lumpen eccentrics typically embarrassed by instinctual flourishes of tooth and claw. Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell), a lycanthropic blutbad thrown by circumstance into unofficial partnership with the Grimm--think of him as a cross between The Wire's snitch Bubbles and consulting detective Adrian Monk--effortlessly carries the series by delicately underplaying the role of Big Bad Wolf as that of a rock star who's retired to foodie indulgences, obsessive enthusiasms, and restless bonhomie. He is the Malkmus in winter. 

His playful, complicated take upon the limitations of twelve-step philosophy and a quite literal original sin speaks volumes more about the humanish condition than the plotlines of other creatures in the series, which are mostly four-color-retellings of Ellis-Island-era origin myths, thrice removed from the modern immigrant experience. None of it makes a lick of sense. We've no more idea of the biological underpinnings of the extended wesen family (nearly each one beholden to a different animal) than why they've all descended on Portland. 

But it's hard not to accept the idea that Portland serves as spiritual beacon for all the beasties of bygone lore. Isn't that the local consensus, anyways?

We already congratulate one another for recognizing it's different here and wax vaguely moony on the indefinable specialness of our citizenry. For Leverage, we may be just a small city. But with Grimm, just the slightest flight of fancy would make wesen out of all our native sons: Sam Adams as meercat, Tres Shannon as blue heron, Courtney Taylor as alpaca.