Forget Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle. Why doesn’t
somebody investigate the inexplicable phenomenon of the Television
Doppelganger? Its first recorded sighting of the modern era came in
1988, when CBS (“Tour Of Duty”) and ABC (“China Beach”) debuted Vietnam
war dramas at virtually the same time. But TV para-anthropologists have
traced the Doppelganger clear back to 1962, when the World War II dramas
“Combat!” and “The Gallant Men” hit the airwaves with three days of one
another.
The TV Doppelganger is not some weird
effect related strictly to war shows; it has been spotted with shows
about everything from time travel to psychic detectives to family life
in the 1960s. And this fall it’s taken its strangest form yet, with two
networks offering up dramas in which fairy tales come to life.
NBC’s
“Grimm,” which debuts Friday, shares the fundamental premise of ABC’s
“Once Upon A Time,” which premiered last week: that children’s fairy
tales are not fantasies or even Jungian archetypes but honest-to-God
journalism, describing a secret supernatural underworld that has bled
over into ours. What’s perhaps even odder than the coincidence of
concept and subject matter is that both shows are fairly well-made.
“Grimm”
is much the darker of the two, its dramatic blood lines running less to
Disney cartoons than “CSI” and other grisly police procedurals. Indeed,
its hero is an Oregon homicide detective named Nick Burkhardt (David
Giuntoli, “Turn The Beat Around”) who fears he’s having a mental
breakdown: He’s suffering from frightful hallucinations in which people
he passes in the street morph into death’s-head gargoyles and worse.
When
he confides in the aging aunt who raised him, now on her death bed, she
has good news (Burkhardt isn’t crazy) and bad news (he’s about to
inherit a family curse). Burkhardt is descended from the Grimms, who
weren’t spinners of fairy tales but a legion of demon-slayers fated to
battle with werewolves, monstrous bears and other creatures documented
in such stories as “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Goldilocks.”
“We
have the ability to see what no one else can,” Burkhardt’s aunt warns
him. “When they lose control they can’t hide, and we see them for what
they really are.” Of course, that works both ways, and Burkhardt is soon
set upon by a ghoul wielding a scythe inscribed REAPERS OF THE GRIMMS.
The supernaturals, dying at the hands of Grimms for centuries, regard
them as a diabolical race of serial killers.
Grimm
has an attractive young cast, including not only the hunky Giuntoli but
also Russell Hornsby of “Lincoln Heights” as his police partner and
Bitsie Tulloch of “quarterlife” as his fiance. And the show shrewdly
offers more than a monster of the week, with some absorbing subplots
that continue from week to week. (Among the more intriguing: what
Burkhardt will do about his impending marriage. Does he really want to
have children fated to spend their lives hacking up giant Pied-Piper
rats on a weekly basis?)
The show might even
breathe some life into the decaying police-procedural genre, which is
now down to a single “Law&Order” and some seriously wheezing “CSIs.”
Though the irony of demon-slayers saving the lives of television’s most
pernicious zombies is nigh unbearable.
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GRIMM
9-10 p.m. EDT Friday
NBC
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©2011 The Miami Herald
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