WRITTEN BY LOUISE FARR PORTRAITS BY TOM KELLER Jim Kouf & David Greenwalt brew police procedural with fantasy-horror to concoct Grimm. nough. I’m done, a burned-out David Greenwalt told himself back in 2010. The phenomenally suc-cessful showrunner— The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel —was finished with the TV-writing business. Maybe he’d teach instead of write, Greenwalt thought at the time—except he’d already tried that and found it damned hard, not to mention underpaid. Of course, requests for meetings kept on coming, but he turned them all down, including one from producer Todd Milliner. Greenwalt told his agent, Bob Gumer, that he just didn’t want to take the meeting. Why do it? It was pointless. He was out of the industry. This time Gumer prevailed by offering to accompany his client to Milliner’s Hazy Mills production office. “He was afraid I’d fall asleep on the couch,” Greenwalt jokes. Then, the moment Milliner mentioned the concept—“a modern retelling of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales”—the jaded Greenwalt thought, Wow, what a good idea. So once again it was back on the pitch trail. His initial presentation to NBC was “pretty bad,” Greenwalt admits, explaining that it wasn’t sufficiently “hard-edged or excit-ing.” For one thing, his original hero Nick Burkhardt, the 26 • WG A W WRITTEN BY SUMMER 20 15 E last living descendant of the Grimm family, was a hotelier. The network bought into the premise, anyway, with the proviso that the lead be a cop, and Greenwalt went off to write a pilot. “I knew for sure I couldn’t do it alone,” he says. So he contacted longtime writing partner Jim Kouf and begged, “You’ve got to do this with me.” By 2015, Grimm, an hour-long police procedural-cum– relationship fantasy that teems with tentacled, slithery, fanged, and destructive creatures known as Wesen (pro-nounced Vessen), is heading toward its fifth season on NBC in the fall and has begun a TNT syndication run. Along the way, Grimm evolved from solving a crime an episode into a sweeping saga that spans royal blood feuds dating back centuries. At San Diego’s Comic-Con pop-culture fest, Grimm pan-els overflow with devoted fans, and the series has spawned a Grimm -based merchandising bonanza in playing cards, pins, lunchboxes, and paperbacks. (The show’s co-creator Stephen Carpenter, who once had a Grimm script in devel-opment at CBS but isn’t involved with the NBC version, has even penned a handful of YA Grimm novels.) Ironically—after kicking off all this Grimm business
Written By Summer 2015: Page 26
