There’s a kind of compromise that you have to make with yourself if you’re going to watch network television. No hour-long thing on network TV will ever be as good as what’s on cable. Cable’s given us The Wire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, and Battlestar Galactica. Shows like that have significantly amped up what I want from an hour of TV. When watching something like Grimm, one has to realize that as good as a given piece of network programming might be, it will never be as good as, for example Deadwood. (Though there are exceptions to this- namely, things involving Joss Whedon or Star Trek.)
That said, last night’s episode of Grimm was pretty good- for network television. The focus of the plot was not so much “whodunit” but “what’s going on?” In fact, the murder at the start of the show that gets the cops called and involved in the whole mess turns out to be fairly external to what the episode was about, which was gladiatorial deathmatches.
The episode didn’t have too many Portland landmarks in it. There was a brief exterior shot of the SE industrial area, a few scenes in Forest Park, and Slabtown made an appearance. That was about it, other than the recurring shots of the Fremont Bridge that appear in just about every episode. Hit the jump for Lion-people, swords, bloody deathmatches, and cannibalism.
