Watching: Grimm - I'm all for simplicity in laying out your premise from the off, being personally of the mind that what scuppered Paul Tobin's Spider-Girl comic book series was the inherently complex backstory of the character who it was introducing in issue one: a teenager who got a magic tattoo that gave her armor and spider-themed powers that she initially used to carve out a career as a superhero called Arana, then she became a Spider-themed superhero called Spider-Girl even though she'd lost her spider-themed powers by this stage yet was still a member of a team of young superheroes, one of whom - a girl who was Captain America's sidekick on a duplicate Earth created by the son of two of the members of the Fantastic Four when he had God-like powers which he used to create a world in which to hide his parents and their superhero friends from a huge Forbidden Planet monster made by the leader of the X-Men - was her best friend. This had to be explained to the reader in issue one, and there was another Spider-Girl series written by Tom DeFalco which featured a main character whose origin reads "she is Peter Parker's daughter" - can you guess which of these two characters had a book that ran for over a hundred issues?
Sometimes simplicity is your friend when it comes to setting out your stock, but sometimes you get shows like V, where someone was told "it's a show about aliens called V" and somewhere along the line somebody on staff decided "that must mean the aliens are called the Vs" and despite watching sci-fi for pretty much all my life and loving a show where a dwarf plays a silver dildo that follows Gil Gerard around a galaxy composed of polystyrene corridors, my reaction to this is "that is just fucking stupid."
I had a similar response to Grimm, where someone was told "that Fables thing sure does sell a lot of books, so go make us a series where fairy tales are real - you could maybe call it Grimm, after the Brothers Grimm" and somebody decided "there are these people called the Grimms and they hunt monsters derived from fairytales" and again I'm left thinking "seriously, he hangs around with nobody but women and he's never tapped Wilma? I mean, look how she dresses, and he even has a little rainbow armband, for God's sake. How am I the only one thinking this?" Oh, and also "this Grimm show is fucking stupid" but the latter doesn't distract me as much as the former. Don't get me wrong, it's not that it's dumb that I object to, it's that there seems to be an assumption on the part of the production staff that the viewer is. Based on episode 1, I am not a fan.
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