Though I am slightly loath to admit it, I have been rewatching Grimm. It is dark and wet in Portland, as it always is at the start of the year—January is just ever so January—and a somewhat ridiculous procedural show about a fairy tale cop feels like just the thing.
It’s also weirdly comforting, which is another thing I am reluctant to confess. I do not generally find cop shows comforting, and the very idea of a fairy tale cop is gently hilarious to anyone who grew up on fairy tales, in which there are many things, but not usually cops. There are wolves and trolls and princes and witches and all manner of creatures, but at best there might be some sort of hapless authority figure who gets turned into a bear or something. (I’m using a loose definition of fairy tales here.)
But in each episode of Grimm, at least in the early and very episodic seasons, a fairy tale cop (who is also a regular cop) solves a crime generally committed by a person who is also a magical creature, of which Portland has a surprising abundance. (Bird people! Wolf people! Cat people! Spider people!) Sometimes the magical creature-people are misunderstood, sometimes they’re vicious, sometimes they’re just ordinary guys who make clocks and offer the fairy tale cop a beer. There is magic, and mundanity—and there is closure.
[Read more]
