NBC's Grimm at Comic-Con

Highlights from NBC's 'Grimm' puts the gruesome back in Grimm's Fairy Tales by Mike Snider:

Grimm, which debuts Oct. 21 at 9 p.m. ET, will likely get a look from fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel as former Buffy writer/producer David Greenwalt and Angel writer/producer Jim Kouf are writing and executive producing the new series.

The series stars David Guintoli as Portland, Ore., police detective Nick Burckhardt, a modern-day ancestor of the Grimm brothers, who can sense the monstrous alter egos of some people. Crimes that he investigates with partner Hank Green (Russell Hornsby) have parallels to classic Grimm's Fairy Tales.

"Most of these fairy tales involve some kind of a crime," Greenwalt said. "In Cinderella, her sisters had their eyes plucked out. We try to find what the crime is and turn it on it's head."

This first episode is loosely based on Little Red Riding Hood. Future episodes will play off the tales of Cinderella, The Three Little Pigs and Goldilocks and The Three Bears.

Each episode will be self-contained "like opening a book and reading a fairy tale," Greenwalt said. "And we're going to solve a crime each week. But there are going to be all kinds of hidden messages and arcs for all the characters. Terrible things are going to happen to many of them."

Greenwalt said that Todd Milliner (Hot in Cleveland), who along with Sean Hayes (Will and Grace) is an executive producer for the series, "had an idea in the shower about six years ago. 'What can we do that's in public domain?' And he came up with Grimm and he came to Jim and myself and he said, 'Grimm in the modern world.' And we just went for that."

From Comic-Con 2011: GRIMM Panel Recap by Max Lichtig:

The pilot opens with said college girl as she begins an innocent jog through the woods while “Sweat dreams are made of these” blasts on her Ipod. She’s wearing a red jacket, so we already know it’s a Red Riding Hood tale. Everything seems peachy clean until she is violently killed. The tone is perfectly set as a twisted dark comedy, but as the episode continues, the lack in chemistry between the actors as well as inconsistencies in the strength of the dialogue begins to compromise the continuity. Thankfully, the comic relief offered by a couple characters and the strong plot carry it through until a very suspenseful and fulfilling conclusion that left me wanting more.

Here’s what I watched in detail. Our hero, detective Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli), runs into his dying aunt Marie who raised him since his parents died in a mysterious accident. She tells him that he is one of the last remaining living descendents of the Grimm family: a group of hunters whose task has forever been to stop the crimes of supernatural creatures. In a run-in with a suspected culprit who turns out to be a friendly “big bad wolf” named Monroe, Nick learns that most of what he thought about the fairy tale was wrong. Monroe does have a heightened sense of smell and goes wild whenever someone passes with red clothing on, but he’s really just a wisecracking vegetarian who favors palates over the spilling of innocent blood (His character is hilarious and by far one of the highlights of the pilot, and I am very eager to see how his relationship with Nick unfolds). On his hunt to find a missing girl, Nick finds the real culprit who is holding the girl hostage and has plans to kill her. I don’t want to give too much away, but the pilot ends in a twist that left me in anticipation.

After the screening, the cast and executive producers sat down for an especially delightful Q and A headed by Anthony Head (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The show’s creator, David Greenwalt, mentioned that we should be expecting all kinds of creatures to pop up; some deriving from the Grimm universe, and some not. They emphasized the fact that they will be drawing from many fairy tales that do not only originate from the Grimm fairy tales. They already have plans to write retellings of classics like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the Three Little Wolves (instead of pigs), as well as a new twist on the Cinderella classic. When asked what order they will arrange the fairy tales with the episodes, Greenwalt joked “We’ll pull it out of our ass”.