A Cop, a Wolf, a Spice Shop, and a City That Looked Like Rain
There are shows you watch because everyone is watching them. Then there are shows you follow because, somewhere along the way, they quietly become part of your week. Grimm was one of those for me.
I was not, by any respectable definition, a scholar of the show. I did not maintain a corkboard of Wesen genealogies, red string, and suspicious-looking German words. I did not memorise the politics of the Royal Families or keep a detailed spreadsheet of who had betrayed whom, although with Grimm, that sort of thing might actually have helped. But I did follow it semi-religiously up until the last season, which, in the old television sense, meant making space for it. Waiting for it. Remembering where it had left everyone. Coming back to Portland again and again, where the forests looked damp, the interiors looked lived-in, and every ordinary person at a bar, butcher shop, hospital, council meeting, or abandoned warehouse might suddenly reveal a second face underneath the first.
That was the hook, of course. Detective Nick Burkhardt, homicide cop, learns that fairy tales were not fairy tales at all. They were field reports. Warnings. Case files. The Brothers Grimm, in this universe, had not been collectors of folklore so much as chroniclers of the things that most humans were never meant to see. Nick is one of their descendants, able to see Wesen — creatures hidden in plain sight, living among humans, slipping between civilised manners and older instincts.
It was a terrific premise, but plenty of shows have terrific premises. Many of them burn through the clever idea by episode six and spend the next few seasons pretending not to notice. What made Grimm work, at least for me, was not only the mythology. It was the company. Nick, Hank, Monroe, Rosalee, Juliette, Wu, Renard, Adalind — they were written, acted, and arranged in that unusually satisfying way where you enjoy seeing them in a room together, even when the story itself is being held together with ancient keys, conspiracy leftovers, and a magical stick nobody should probably be touching without gloves.
The show was fun. That sounds almost faint as praise now, as if fun were a lesser virtue. But it is not. Fun is hard. Especially sustained fun. Especially in a show that ran for six seasons, balanced monsters-of-the-week with serial mythology, tried to make invented Germanic creature names sound serious, and still managed to create a little found family in the middle of all that Portland weirdness.
Looking back, Grimm feels like one of the last sturdy representatives of a particular kind of genre television: the network supernatural procedural that knew exactly what it was, but was just ambitious enough to become more than that. It was not prestige television and it was not disposable either. It occupied a more useful middle ground: a weekly haunt, dependable enough to return to and strange enough to keep opening new doors.
Before Streaming Ate the Waiting Room
Part of remembering Grimm means remembering the television landscape it belonged to.
It premiered in 2011, in that transitional period when network television was still trying to hold its shape while streaming waited in the trees, sharpening its teeth. This was after Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after Angel, after The X-Files, after Supernatural had already established that two people could drive around America investigating folklore for what felt like a lifetime. It was also the same season that Once Upon a Time arrived, which meant fairy tales were suddenly being repackaged for prime time in two very different ways.
Once Upon a Time went broad, glossy, and Disney-adjacent. Grimm went damp, procedural, and slightly feral.
That difference mattered. Grimm did not ask us to enter a magical kingdom. It asked us to believe the magical kingdom had a police precinct, a morgue, a coroner’s report, and a worrying number of suspects with excellent night vision. The show’s world was not separate from ours. It was layered over ours, badly concealed, leaking through.
That structure was comforting in the way network genre shows used to be comforting. There was a case. The case would look ordinary for approximately eight minutes. Then someone’s face would ripple, the music would grumble, Nick would squint in that quietly troubled way of his, and suddenly we were off. A jogger had been killed by something with claws. A family secret involved a species with mating rituals that should probably require municipal oversight. A seemingly harmless shopkeeper turned out to have deep ties to a culture older and more dangerous than the neighbourhood suggested.
The formula was reliable without being dead. At its best, Grimm understood that formula is not the enemy. Laziness is. A good formula is like a good old jacket. You know how it sits on you. You know which pocket holds the keys. You can still go somewhere unexpected in it.
Portland Was Not Just the Backdrop
One of the show’s best decisions was setting and filming in Portland, Oregon.
It gave Grimm a texture. Not just scenery, but mood. The forests felt properly old. The streets had that slightly off-centre quality that made the show’s premise feel more plausible than it had any right to be. Portland, already associated in the broader imagination with eccentricity and damp charm, became the perfect place for a hidden non-human civilisation to operate with relative comfort. Where else could a Blutbad live quietly, maintain an elaborate clock collection, make good tea, and try to keep his wolfish appetites under control?
The city gave the show contrast. Police stations, lofts, antique shops, spice shops, old houses, wooded paths, municipal interiors, cafés, back rooms, rainy night streets. The show never looked expensive in the way glossy streaming fantasy later became expensive, but it had atmosphere. Sometimes atmosphere is better. Money can buy scale, but not always character.
The Portland setting also helped Grimm avoid feeling like a generic monster procedural assembled from studio backlots and leftover warehouses. Even when it used familiar genre beats, the location gave those beats a specific weather. I remember the show as green, grey, brown, amber. Forest moss. Street lamps. Old wood. Police fluorescents. Monroe’s house. Rosalee’s shop. The trailer, packed with weapons and books and warnings from dead generations.
That trailer might be one of my favourite genre-TV objects. Every good supernatural show needs a headquarters, but Grimm gave Nick a mobile archive of ancestral paranoia: handwritten illustrations, old-world weapons and warnings from dead generations waiting for the next ugly thing to crawl out of someone’s bloodline. It was part library, part armoury, part family curse on wheels — very sensible, and completely uninsurable.
Nick Burkhardt: The Straight Man in a Crooked World
David Giuntoli’s Nick Burkhardt was not the loudest character on Grimm. He was not designed to be.
Nick begins as a decent homicide detective with a stable relationship, a good partner, and a life that appears, by television standards, dangerously functional. Then his Aunt Marie arrives, the truth opens up, and he discovers that the world is full of hidden creatures and that he is descended from the people historically tasked with hunting them.
In a lesser version of the show, Nick might have become an instant action hero with a leather coat problem. But the charm of his early arc is how much he has to learn. He is not immediately good at being a Grimm. He is observant, moral, and physically capable, but he is also frequently out of his depth. The old Grimm legacy tells him one thing: Wesen are dangerous. The reality in front of him tells him something more complicated: some are dangerous, some are frightened, some are ordinary citizens, some are victims, some are predators, and some are Monroe.
That is Nick’s real journey. Not simply from cop to monster hunter, but from inherited prejudice to ethical improvisation. He has to decide what kind of Grimm he is going to be. The old ways are brutal. The new world is messier. Nick is constantly negotiating between law, instinct, friendship, and legacy.
This is where the police-procedural structure becomes more interesting than it first appears. Nick already works inside a system that claims to distinguish guilt from innocence. Becoming a Grimm adds another system on top of it — older, bloodier, less accountable. The tension is not always explored with philosophical depth, but it is there. Nick has power other people do not have. He can see what others cannot. The question becomes what he does with that sight.
What keeps Nick watchable is that he is basically a decent man trying to remain decent under increasingly bizarre conditions. There is something very network-TV heroic about that, and I mean that kindly. He does not have the operatic self-loathing of a premium-cable antihero. He has a job, a partner, a girlfriend, a dogged sense of responsibility, and eventually a social circle that includes a reformed wolf-man, a fox-like herbalist, a police sergeant who has seen too much, and an ex-Hexenbiest who complicates every available category.
Nick is the centre, but he is not the whole show. That matters. Grimm became stronger when it stopped pretending he had to carry every emotional colour himself and allowed the ensemble to do what ensembles are supposed to do: make the world feel inhabited.
Monroe: The Secret Weapon
If Grimm has a soul, it might be Monroe. Silas Weir Mitchell’s reformed Blutbad — essentially the show’s Big Bad Wolf variant — could have gone wrong very easily. On paper, he is exposition with a cardigan, Nick’s guide to the Wesen world and the man who knows which obscure creature custom will ruin everyone’s evening. In practice, he becomes one of the best things about the show.
Monroe is funny without being a joke. Nervous, articulate, fussy, principled, wounded, romantic, occasionally terrifying, and deeply invested in the maintenance of self-control. He is a creature of appetite who has chosen discipline. The show gets a lot of mileage from that contradiction. He can discuss clocks, tea, Pilates, ancient traditions, and dismemberment with the same mild intensity. He is civilised, but not tame. There is a difference.
What makes Monroe work is that he gives the Wesen world intimacy. Without him, Nick’s inherited Grimm knowledge might have remained dusty and abstract. Monroe turns it into culture. He explains customs, rivalries, taboos, dietary concerns, grudges, folklore, and the everyday inconvenience of being a supernatural creature trying to live quietly in modern America.
He also gives the show its first real friendship. Nick and Monroe should not make sense together. One is a Grimm; the other is exactly the sort of creature Grimms historically killed. But their relationship grows through trust, usefulness, awkwardness, and eventually loyalty. It is one of the show’s great pleasures watching Monroe go from reluctant consultant to indispensable friend, then to family.
In a show full of claws, curses, and conspiracies, Monroe’s kitchen often feels like the safest place in Portland. Which is funny, because there is probably a specialised Wesen sausage recipe somewhere in the family archive that nobody should ask about too closely.
Rosalee: Grace Under Pressure, With Access to Dangerous Ingredients
Bree Turner’s Rosalee Calvert enters the show as a Fuchsbau and apothecary, and the series becomes warmer and richer because of her.
Rosalee is one of those characters who makes a genre world feel practical. She understands the old remedies, the powders, the teas, the potions, the cultural rituals, the things you mix carefully because if you get the dosage wrong someone grows extra teeth or remembers a crime from 1847. She is kind, but not soft. Gentle, but not weak. She carries grief, addiction history, family baggage, and a very grounded moral intelligence.
Her partnership with Monroe is one of the show’s strongest emotional anchors. Their romance works because it is not just “two supernatural people fall in love”. It is two adults choosing a life together while surrounded by centuries of inherited fear and prejudice. Their relationship also allows Grimm to explore Wesen society beyond crime scenes. Family expectations, inter-Wesen tension, old-world rules, the anxiety of belonging, the danger of being seen with the wrong person — all of that comes through Monroe and Rosalee.
They make domesticity feel heroic. In another show, the central romantic plot would be all thunder and destiny. In Grimm, some of the most affecting moments are about whether these two can build a home in a world that keeps finding reasons to make that difficult. Their spice shop becomes both workplace and war room. A place where someone might come in for a rare herb and end up helping prevent an apocalypse.
I liked that about Grimm. It understood the genre value of a good shop. Fantasy needs shops. Not malls. Not brand activations. Shops. Wooden shelves. Jars. Strange labels. A bell over the door. Someone behind the counter who knows exactly what you are and is polite enough not to say it too loudly.
Hank Griffin: The Partner Who Had to Be Let In
Russell Hornsby’s Hank Griffin begins as Nick’s ordinary police partner, which in a show like this means he is doomed to discover that ordinary is a temporary condition.
For a while, Hank serves the necessary function of disbelief. He sees cases that do not add up. He notices Nick behaving strangely. He inhabits the procedural side of the show while Nick is increasingly pulled into the mythological one. The danger with this kind of character is that prolonged ignorance can become irritating. Fortunately, Grimm eventually lets Hank in.
That choice improves the show. Once Hank knows the truth, he becomes more than the human partner left outside the magic room. He becomes part of the team. His groundedness is useful. He does not have Nick’s Grimm vision or Monroe and Rosalee’s cultural knowledge, but he has police instincts, loyalty, and a capacity to adapt that feels refreshingly adult. He is rattled, naturally, but he does not spend three seasons insisting everyone is imagining things while a lizard man climbs across the ceiling behind him.
Hank’s role also helps Nick stay connected to the human stakes of the cases. The show’s mythology expands, sometimes wildly, but Hank keeps one foot in the original premise: crimes are being committed, victims matter, evidence matters, and monsters do not get a free pass just because their names sound like someone sneezed into a German dictionary.
There is a good, lived-in quality to Nick and Hank’s partnership. It never feels like buddy-cop parody. It feels like two men who have worked long hours together, seen bodies together, eaten bad food together, and learned how to read a pause. When Hank becomes part of the inner circle, the show gains another kind of warmth. The team is forming almost accidentally, and that matters; found families are more convincing when they look less designed.
Sergeant Wu: The Slow Burn Payoff
Reggie Lee’s Sergeant Drew Wu is one of the show’s great slow-burn pleasures.
At first, Wu seems like comic support: sharp, dry, competent, slightly underused. He gets the good lines, provides procedural assistance, and reacts with the kind of weary intelligence that makes you think he knows everyone around him is hiding something. The show takes its time with him, sometimes too much time, but when it finally brings him fully into the Wesen truth, it gives him one of the more interesting human responses to the impossible.
Wu does not glide neatly into belief. He struggles. He is frightened. He doubts his sanity. He becomes the audience surrogate in a harsher way than Hank did, because for Wu the revelation is not merely professional. It almost breaks him. And Reggie Lee plays that beautifully — the humour still there, but now with a crack under it.
Once Wu is brought in, the team dynamic feels complete. He adds wit, scepticism, and procedural texture. He is also one of the reasons the show’s cast chemistry works so well. You believe these people have rhythms together. They do not all relate to Nick in the same way. They bring different energies: Monroe’s anxious expertise, Rosalee’s calm competence, Hank’s grounded loyalty, Wu’s dry alertness.
Wu could have remained a side character forever. Instead, he becomes essential. That is one of the pleasures of long-running television. A character who starts on the edge can, over time, become part of the emotional furniture. You do not always notice when it happens. Then one day you realise the room would feel wrong without him.
Juliette, Eve, and the Uneasy Shape of Transformation
Juliette Silverton, played by Bitsie Tulloch, is one of the more complicated parts of Grimm — not only in the story, but in how the show handles her.
In the beginning, Juliette is Nick’s partner in the ordinary world. She is a veterinarian, grounded and compassionate, someone who represents the life Nick is trying to preserve even as his Grimm inheritance makes that increasingly impossible. For a while, the show keeps her outside the full truth, which creates the usual genre problem: the beloved character who is not told enough and therefore has to keep reacting to shadows, half-lies, and suspicious absences.
When Juliette is finally drawn into the mythology, her story becomes stranger, darker, and more divisive. Her transformation into a Hexenbiest changes the emotional geometry of the show. The person who was once Nick’s anchor becomes a danger, then an antagonist, then something else entirely through the Eve storyline.
I have mixed feelings about this arc, but I also think it is one of the reasons Grimm remains interesting to talk about. The show did not keep Juliette in the safe girlfriend box. It gave her rage, power, trauma, and moral fracture. Whether it always handled that transformation with the care it deserved is another matter. Sometimes it felt bold. Sometimes it felt like the writers had thrown all the crockery in the air and were waiting to see which plates survived.
But Tulloch commits to it. Juliette’s shift into Eve is chilly, damaged, and deliberately unsettling. The character becomes a study in what happens when identity is overwritten by power, guilt, manipulation, and survival. The old Juliette cannot simply return, because too much has happened. That is painful, and not always satisfying, but it is dramatically more honest than pretending a few apologies could restore the first-season status quo.
Genre television often uses transformation as metaphor. In Juliette’s case, the metaphor is messy: love curdled by secrecy, power arriving as violation, agency tangled with revenge, and the horror of becoming unrecognisable to the people who knew you best.
Not cosy viewing, exactly. But memorable.
Adalind Schade: From Villainess to Complication
Claire Coffee’s Adalind Schade begins as exactly the sort of character you expect from a supernatural procedural: glamorous, dangerous, manipulative, a Hexenbiest with an agenda and excellent cheekbones. She is introduced through seduction, betrayal, and power politics. In the early episodes, she is easy to categorise.
Then Grimm keeps her around long enough to make that categorisation inconvenient.
Adalind’s arc is one of the show’s most unexpected evolutions. She moves from antagonist to victim of larger games, from pawn to mother, from threat to uneasy ally, and eventually to part of Nick’s deeply complicated domestic life. Not everyone loved that turn, and I understand why. The emotional logistics are, to put it mildly, tangled. The show asks the audience to travel a long way with her, sometimes more quickly than the moral accounting can comfortably support.
But Coffee gives Adalind enough vulnerability, humour, exhaustion, and self-awareness that the transformation becomes compelling. She does not become good in a clean, shiny way. She becomes someone who has done terrible things, suffered terrible things, and is trying to survive the consequences while protecting her children. In a show built on hidden natures, Adalind becomes one of its best examples of identity as something unstable.
The Nick and Adalind relationship remains one of the show’s more debated choices. It is messy, ethically awkward, and soap-operatic in the way genre shows sometimes are when they have been running long enough for everyone to have traumatised everyone else at least once. But it also reveals Grimm’s willingness to complicate its own emotional map. Former enemies become allies. Monsters become parents. Heroes become morally compromised. The old labels blur.
That blurring is, in many ways, the show’s real mythology.
Captain Renard: The Man With Too Many Agendas
Sasha Roiz’s Captain Sean Renard is a gift to a show like Grimm because he enters with secrets already installed.
Renard is Nick’s superior at the precinct, but also a royal half-Zauberbiest with political ties, hidden loyalties, and a face that suggests he has never once entered a room without calculating six possible exits and three betrayals. He brings the show its aristocratic conspiracy thread — the Royal Families, the Verrat, the Resistance, all the old-world power structures that make Nick’s local cases part of something larger.
What makes Renard interesting is that he is rarely simple. He is not a straightforward villain, though he can behave villainously. He is not a clean ally, though he often helps. He is pragmatic, seductive, ambitious, wounded, and occasionally almost noble, which is much more dangerous than being openly evil. Open evil is easy to organise against. Renard is the sort of man who can save you today and ruin you next week, both for reasons that make sense to him.
His relationship with power is one of the show’s continuing engines. He understands institutions. He understands bloodline. He understands the old politics of the Wesen world and the newer politics of human authority. As police captain, royal bastard, father, lover, conspirator, and mayoral candidate, he is a walking conflict of interest.
The show sometimes pushes him hard into villain territory, then pulls him back, then pushes again. Whether that always works is debatable. But Roiz gives him enough gravity that you keep watching. Renard has presence. In a supernatural procedural, that counts for a lot.
Trubel and the Wider Grimm World
Jacqueline Toboni’s Theresa “Trubel” Rubel expands the show in a useful way.
Her arrival reminds us that Nick is not the only Grimm, and that the Grimm inheritance can look very different depending on who receives it and under what circumstances. Trubel is younger, rougher, more feral in her survival instincts. She has had to live with the consequences of seeing Wesen without the benefit of Nick’s relative stability, Aunt Marie’s explanations, or Monroe’s reluctant tutoring.
She gives the mythology another angle. Being a Grimm is not just a cool power. It can isolate, endanger, and psychologically damage a person who does not understand what they are seeing. Trubel’s presence also allows Nick to become a mentor, which subtly marks his own growth. The man who once needed everything explained now has to explain the impossible to someone else.
She is also a reminder that the show’s world is bigger than Portland. Hadrian’s Wall, Black Claw, the larger political conflict — all of that expands the stakes beyond weekly crimes. Whether Grimm was always at its best when it went global is another question. I tend to prefer the Portland material, the local weirdness, the sense that ancient things are hiding behind ordinary doors. But Trubel helps bridge those scales. She belongs both to the street-level danger and the wider war.
The Wesen: A Monster Manual With Feelings
The Wesen were the show’s great toy box.
Blutbad, Fuchsbau, Hexenbiest, Zauberbiest, Eisbiber, Mauvais Dentes, Skalengeck, Ziegevolk, Aswang, Chupacabra, Wendigo — the names alone were half the fun and occasionally half the comedy. Some sounded genuinely ominous. Some sounded like a spellcheck error had gained sentience. But the best creatures gave Grimm its weekly pleasure: the reveal, the woge, the sudden shift from human face to hidden nature.
The visual effects were not always seamless, but they had charm. They belonged to a period of television where you could still forgive a rubbery transformation if the story around it had energy. There was something enjoyable about the predictability of the woge moment. We knew it was coming. The show knew we knew. The suspense was not whether someone would reveal themselves, but what kind of creature they would be, and what that creature meant.
The Wesen concept also allowed the show to explore identity, prejudice, family, addiction, instinct, assimilation, and violence in genre-coded ways. Not every metaphor landed. Some episodes were broad enough to leave dents in the floor. But the premise had range. Wesen were not simply monsters. They had neighbourhoods, marriages, jobs, religious customs, criminal networks, prejudices, food preferences, support systems, and very specific medical issues.
That made the world feel lived-in. A weaker version of Grimm would have treated every creature as a target. The actual show became more interesting because it slowly dismantled Nick’s inherited Grimm worldview. Monroe and Rosalee are not exceptions because they are “good monsters”. They are proof that the old category was broken to begin with.
The show’s best moral question was not “How does Nick defeat the monster?” It was “Who decided this person was a monster?”
For a network procedural, that is not a bad question to keep smuggling into Friday nights.
The Case-of-the-Week Comfort Machine
One reason I liked Grimm is that it respected the case-of-the-week.
That structure has fallen slightly out of fashion in the prestige-streaming era, where everything often has to be an eight-hour film, even when the story only has enough muscle for four. But the episodic procedural has its own rhythm, and when done well, it gives a show room to breathe. You can have a beginning, middle, and end in one sitting. You can explore a strange corner of the world without derailing the whole season. You can let secondary characters shine. You can build mythology in small increments rather than dumping it like wet cement.
Grimm often did that well. A fairy-tale or folklore inspiration would be filtered through a modern crime: kidnapping, murder, fraud, domestic violence, organised crime, revenge, cult behaviour, political conspiracy. Nick and Hank would investigate. Monroe and Rosalee would identify the creature or prepare the remedy. Wu would provide a sharp aside and later increasingly justified concern. Renard would either help, obstruct, or stand handsomely in the middle distance while concealing something. Adalind would complicate the emotional weather.
There was comfort in that machine. Not because it was mindless, but because it created ritual. Genre fans understand ritual. The opening quote. The crime. The first strange clue. Nick’s vision. The research. The confrontation. The woge. The explanation. The closing complication.
Television used to be very good at this. Grimm was not reinventing the medium. It was maintaining a craft.
When the Mythology Got Big
Like many supernatural shows, Grimm eventually expanded beyond its original premise.
The early seasons are relatively contained: Nick discovers his Grimm identity, learns about Wesen society, navigates the complications with Juliette and Hank, and slowly uncovers the broader political world. Then the show grows. The Royal Families become more important. The keys matter. The Resistance and Verrat loom. Adalind’s children become central. Black Claw emerges. Hadrian’s Wall counters it. The magical stick and cloth arrive. By the final season, the show is dealing with alternate dimensions, prophecy, and a skull-faced figure known as Zerstörer.
That escalation is both inevitable and slightly funny. Genre shows have a way of beginning with a dead jogger in the woods and ending with the possible end of everything. You start by asking, “Who killed this woman?” and six years later someone is opening a portal with a cursed relic while three generations of trauma argue in the background.
I do not think Grimm always handled its larger mythology gracefully. Some arcs were more interesting in theory than in execution. The Royals sometimes felt like they belonged to another show, one with more castles and budget. Black Claw had menace, but also the slightly generic flavour of a late-series organisation designed to raise stakes quickly. The final mystical material moved fast because the last season was shorter, and you can feel the compression.
But I also admire the show’s willingness to go there. It did not remain static. It let its characters suffer consequences. It changed relationships. It broke the original domestic arrangement and built something stranger in its place. It allowed the world to widen beyond Nick’s first understanding.
The trick with mythology is that it must deepen the characters, not bury them. Grimm is strongest when the big mythology returns to the small emotional circle: Nick’s loyalty, Monroe and Rosalee’s marriage, Hank and Wu’s trust, Adalind’s motherhood, Renard’s ambition, Juliette/Eve’s damaged identity. When the show remembers that, the mythology works. When it forgets, the machinery shows.
Why the Cast Chemistry Mattered
You can forgive a lot when the cast works.
That is true of many long-running genre shows. The mythology can wobble. The effects can age. The plot can take detours. But if you want to spend time with the people, you come back. Grimm had that. Maybe not from the first minute in fully formed shape, but steadily, warmly, convincingly.
The Nick-Monroe friendship is the first major chemistry engine. Then Monroe and Rosalee become the emotional centre. Hank’s inclusion adds trust. Wu’s inclusion adds relief and wit. Adalind’s evolution creates tension and surprise. Renard’s shifting loyalties keep the room unstable. Juliette’s transformation injects pain into what might otherwise have become too cosy.
The group does not feel assembled by algorithm. It feels discovered over time. That is one of the underrated pleasures of a long network run. Twenty-two-episode seasons give characters time to stand around, check in, bring food, do research, misunderstand each other, apologise badly, and become necessary. Modern shorter seasons often have better pacing, but they sometimes lose that casual accumulation of familiarity.
By the time Grimm is fully itself, the show’s pleasures are not just “What Wesen is this?” but “How will these specific people handle this specific nonsense?” That distinction is everything.
I liked watching them solve problems together. I liked the sense that everyone had a job. Nick could fight and see. Hank could investigate. Monroe could identify. Rosalee could treat. Wu could process information and sarcasm. Renard could reveal that he had known more than he said, obviously. Adalind could make any room more complicated just by entering it.
That is a team. A weird one. But most good teams are.
The Last Season and the Problem of Saying Goodbye Quickly
The final season of Grimm is shorter than the earlier ones, and it feels shorter.
That is not automatically a flaw. Some shows benefit from compression. But Grimm had spent years building a world that liked side roads. It liked creature lore, shop talk, domestic beats, small jokes, procedural detail. A thirteen-episode final season has less room for that. It has to resolve Renard’s conflict, deal with Eve’s condition, handle the stick, bring the Zerstörer arc into focus, give the ensemble stakes, and deliver a finale that feels both dangerous and emotionally satisfying.
That is a lot of crockery to stack on one tray.
Still, I remember the ending with more affection than frustration. The finale understands that Grimm has become a family story. Not just blood family, though there is plenty of that, but chosen family, inherited family, damaged family, impossible family. The final movements bring back the idea of legacy: Nick’s Grimm line, the next generation, the stories continuing after the camera leaves.
The ending is not bleak, which feels right. Grimm was dark in texture but not nihilistic in spirit. It liked monsters, but it also liked friendship, loyalty, marriage, children, practical problem-solving, and old books. It was never a show about despair. It was about hidden danger, yes, but also about learning enough to live with what you know.
The time jump gives the whole thing a storybook closure. Some viewers may find it too neat. I understand that. But for me, Grimm earned a little neatness. After six seasons of betrayals, transformations, murders, curses, secret societies, and emotional rearrangements, I did not mind the show closing the book with the suggestion that the work goes on.
Not everything has to end by setting the house on fire.
Sometimes you let the next generation pick up the weapon, check the old records, and head out into the rain.
What Has Aged Well
The best parts of Grimm have aged better than I expected.
The cast chemistry still works. Monroe and Rosalee remain lovely. Nick’s moral evolution remains a solid spine. Hank and Wu become more enjoyable once the truth is out. The Portland atmosphere still gives the show its own flavour. The practical shape of the episodes — crime, creature, culture, complication — remains satisfying.
The show also benefits from being slightly outside the current content machine. It does not feel designed to become a weekly discourse event. It does not strain to be the darkest, cleverest, most morally punishing thing in the room. It wants to entertain, occasionally scare, sometimes move, and often make you wonder whether the quiet accountant in the next queue is secretly a vole-person with a knife collection. There is something refreshing about that now.
The creature design is uneven, but charming. The procedural plotting can be obvious, but usually sturdy. The mythology sometimes overreaches, but the emotional core keeps pulling it back. The show’s use of folklore is loose, sometimes very loose, but it has the enthusiasm of someone rummaging through an old cabinet and finding things that still have teeth.
What also ages well is its middle-register confidence. Grimm was not embarrassed to be genre television. It did not smirk at its own premise. It let people say absurd words seriously. It let the audience buy in. That kind of sincerity matters. The moment a fantasy show starts apologising for itself, the spell breaks.
Grimm never really apologised. It just opened another dusty book and got on with it.
What Has Aged Less Well
Of course, not everything is immune to time.
Some early episodes feel very much like early-2010s network television, with the pacing, lighting, and occasional bluntness that comes with that. Some of the creature names and cultural borrowings are, let us say, handled with varying degrees of elegance. The police-procedural frame can be comforting, but it also carries assumptions that feel different now than they did when the show aired. The “monster equals criminal suspect” setup needed the nuance Monroe and Rosalee eventually gave it; without them, it could have become much flatter.
The show’s treatment of Juliette remains divisive. I respect the ambition of the arc more than I always enjoy watching it. There are moments where her pain feels dramatically useful but emotionally under-examined. Adalind’s redemption arc is compelling, but also asks the viewer to accept a great deal of moral compression. Renard’s allegiances sometimes swing so hard that one suspects even he needed a spreadsheet.
And like many shows of its era, Grimm occasionally mistook escalation for depth. Bigger conspiracies do not automatically mean richer storytelling. The most memorable episodes are often the ones where the strange case reveals something intimate about the world, not the ones where another faction introduces another layer of ancient power management.
But these flaws are part of the object. They do not erase the pleasure. They make the show more human, in the way long-running television becomes human: inconsistent, durable, occasionally ridiculous, sometimes better than it needs to be.
Why It Was Fun
I keep coming back to that word: fun, because Grimm had a premise you could explain in one sentence and a world that kept expanding without losing the pleasure of the weekly case. The monsters were not always monsters. Monroe could turn a simple explanation into a small nervous lecture, Rosalee could diagnose a supernatural crisis with the weary calm of someone who had seen worse in aisle three, and Hank and Wu had to keep adjusting their definition of reality while still doing police work. Renard could look as if he were about to save the day or invoice someone for betraying it, while Adalind could make any room more complicated merely by entering it.
Nick, meanwhile, remained recognisably a man trying to do the right thing with incomplete information. More than anything, the show understood that genre pleasure is not only about surprise. Sometimes it is about returning to a place where the rules are strange but familiar: the spice shop, the precinct, Monroe’s house, the trailer, the woods, and that moment when someone’s face changes and the episode suddenly leans forward. A lot of current television wants to be consumed. Grimm wanted to be visited, and that difference matters.
The Comfort of Hidden Worlds
I think part of the appeal of Grimm lies in the hidden-world fantasy itself.
Most of us live with the suspicion that the visible world is not the whole world. Not in a literal Wesen sense, obviously, although I have met a few people in meetings who made me wonder. But in the sense that every ordinary surface hides systems, histories, appetites, loyalties, and fears we do not see. Families have hidden rules. Workplaces have hidden hierarchies. Cities have hidden maps. People carry hidden faces.
Grimm literalises that. Someone looks normal until the mask slips. A restaurant owner, a lawyer, a child, a politician, a neighbour — all may belong to an older order. The show’s supernatural conceit works because it exaggerates something socially recognisable: people are not always what they appear to be.
But the more generous part of Grimm is that hiddenness does not automatically equal evil. Some Wesen hide because they are dangerous. Others hide because they are endangered. Some are trying to pass. Some are trying to reform. Some are just trying to run a business, raise a family, maintain a relationship, and not have a Grimm with a crossbow misunderstand the situation.
That is why Monroe and Rosalee matter so much. They transform the hidden world from a threat into a society. They complicate Nick’s sight. Seeing is not the same as understanding. That might be the show’s quietest useful idea.
A Grimm can see the truth of a face. He still has to learn the truth of a person.
The Rewatch Question
Would I rewatch Grimm now? Yes, but probably not in the same way.
I would not race through it just to get the plot. The plot is not really the point anymore. I would rewatch it for mood. For the early uncertainty. For Monroe. For the spice shop. For Hank’s gradual induction into madness. For Wu’s deadpan survival. For Rosalee’s calm. For the Portland rain. For the old network rhythm of a story that begins, complicates, resolves, and leaves a little hook in the door.
I would also rewatch it with some patience for its era. Every show carries the fingerprints of the time that made it. Grimm belongs to that space just before bingeing fully rewired television. It was built to be returned to weekly, not swallowed whole in a weekend while half-looking at your phone and wondering whether the next episode will explain the thing you just missed because you were checking shipping updates.
That weekly architecture shows. There is repetition, but also reinforcement. There are monster-of-the-week stories that would probably be trimmed from a modern streaming version, but those are also where the world breathes. Lose too many of them and you lose the texture.
I suspect that is why people still feel warmly about the show. Not because every arc was perfect, or because the mythology was airtight, but because it had a place, a rhythm, and people you liked seeing again. That is rarer than it sounds.
If the Reboot Happens
There is still a possible return sitting somewhere in development limbo. In January 2025, Variety reported that Peacock was developing a feature-length Grimm reboot, with Josh Berman writing and original showrunners David Greenwalt and Jim Kouf among the executive producers. The plot and cast were not announced, which left plenty of room for fans to imagine which version of Portland might open its doors again.
By August 2026, though, the project still had not been greenlit. During the show’s fifteenth-anniversary reunion, the cast told Den of Geek that they did not know what was happening with it. That feels almost appropriately Grimm: something may be out there in the woods, but nobody has yet confirmed whether it is actually coming towards us.
If it does move forward, I hope whoever makes it understands what the original got right. It was never just “cop sees monsters”. The trick was the balance: procedural and mythology, horror and humour, danger and domesticity, folklore and friendship. A return that only chases darker violence would miss the point, and one that polishes the world until every surface gleams would miss it as well. Grimm needs a little roughness, a little rain in the gutters, a shop full of suspicious jars, and somebody who can explain a five-century-old Wesen custom while clearly regretting that they answered the door.
The mythology is flexible enough for new Grimms, new cities and other creature traditions, but the emotional recipe matters more than the franchise mechanics. You need the guide, the sceptic, the morally compromised ally, the safe room, the old archive and the ordinary life being invaded by the extraordinary. And you need humour — not constant quipping, but the character humour that comes from people trying to behave normally while handling the completely abnormal. That was one of Grimm’s quiet strengths. It knew absurdity was part of the deal.
A Show That Knew Its Job
When I think about Grimm now, I do not think of it as one of the great television landmarks. That would be the wrong frame. It was not trying to be that. It was trying to be a solid, atmospheric, entertaining supernatural procedural with a growing mythology and a cast worth following, and it succeeded at that job remarkably often.
That may sound modest, but modest television virtues are badly underrated. A good premise. A good cast. A good setting. A weekly rhythm. Characters who become more interesting over time. A mythology that gives the audience something to chew on. Enough humour to keep the darkness from curdling. Enough sincerity to keep the fantasy alive.
Grimm lasted because it was built well enough to last. Not flawlessly. Not elegantly in every corner. But sturdily. Like Monroe’s house. Like the spice shop shelves. Like that trailer full of ancestral warnings. It had craft. It had charm. It had a world you could recognise after one shot of wet trees and old wood.
I followed it because I liked it. Simple as that.
I liked the cast chemistry. I liked the stories. I liked the idea that fairy tales were not bedtime stories but survival documents. I liked that the Big Bad Wolf became the best friend. I liked that the show found warmth inside a world of claws. I liked that it could be frightening, funny, silly, romantic, violent, and oddly cosy, sometimes in the same episode.
And maybe that is why it stays with me. Not as a perfect show, but as a dependable one. A show that turned up, opened the old book, and invited us back into the woods.
Some shows are monuments. Grimm was more like a familiar door at the end of a rainy street: you knew something strange was behind it, and you knocked anyway.
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