About the Show
Portland homicide detective Nick Burkhardt is seeing things: faces that ripple and change into animals, monsters, things out of nightmare — usually at crime scenes, usually attached to the suspect. His dying aunt, who raised him, explains the inheritance: Nick is a Grimm, the latest in a line of hunters who can see the Wesen, the hidden fairy-tale creatures living disguised among humanity, and who are expected to keep the balance between their world and ours. The catch is that every Wesen alive can also see what Nick is, and a Grimm’s arrival in town is, historically, very bad news for them.
David Giuntoli leads the series across six seasons and 123 episodes, and its masterstroke is Monroe — a reformed Blutbad, a wolf-creature played with warmth and comic precision by Silas Weir Mitchell — who becomes Nick’s guide to Wesen culture and best friend, the monster helping the hunter hunt monsters. Around them, creators David Greenwalt and Jim Kouf build a full hidden society out of Grimm’s fairy tales: feuds, royal families, resistance movements and a mythology that deepens season by season while Portland’s rain keeps the procedural cases coming.
Why This Show Matters to Sci-Fi
Grimm is one of the most successful fusions of the police procedural with fantasy-horror worldbuilding ever aired — a network series that sustained a dense, continuing mythology for six seasons without losing its case-of-the-week accessibility. It treats folklore the way science fiction treats alien biology: as a system with rules, species, politics and history to be explored. In the crowded field of fairy-tale television, it is the one that built a world fans still map, catalogue and revisit — a modern-mythology landmark hiding inside a cop show.
Where to Watch
Watch on YouTube (rent or buy) — that link is the Season 1 premiere, “Pilot,” and all six seasons are available episode by episode on YouTube. The series also streams on Peacock.
