NBC’s “Grimm” detective spin on the fairy tale genre starts tonight

By Stacey Harrison


Fairy tales aren’t the only genre that Grimm is subverting. The crime procedural also gets turned on its head in this imaginative hybrid, which premieres tonight at 9pm. It follows Portland, Ore., detective Nick Burckhardt (David Giuntoli), who learns he is the latest in a line of people who have the ability to identify monsters the world at large thinks are only mythical. That guy who kidnaps children, for instance, actually is a Big Bad Wolf.

The catch is, Burckhardt can identify the guilty party before he can actually prove anything, so he must use actual forensics and detective work to make his case.

“I see myself as a regular guy, and I find out that extraordinary things are going to be happening to me,” Giuntoli says of his character. “It is the first time I’ve worked in something where people’s faces change into wolves, but the joy of it is I play it for the reality of, ‘What would that be like if that was actually happening to me?’ I’m learning the new rules as the audience is learning the new rules. I don’t know who is good, I don’t know who is bad anymore. Everybody is a question mark. So that suspense is really alive.”

Photo: © NBCUniversal, Inc. Credit: Scott Green