I’ll be honest, its been a while since I've thought about Grimm, the supernatural series that ran on NBC for six seasons. The show followed a Portland, Oregon police detective who had the power to see monsters living among us. Ultimately, Grimm was cancelled in 2016 and, while I haven’t thought about it in a while, I enjoyed the series when I watched it. So I was happy to hear that a reboot of the series is in development. However, a new comment from one of the OG cast members has me even more curious.
Bitsie Tulloch played Juliette Silverton -- the girlfriend of the series’ main character, David Burkhardt (played by David Giuntoli). This was years she would go on to portray Lois Lane in the Arrowverse. Tulloch posted to Instagram after the news that a new Grimm movie was in development for Peacock. Interestingly, while most of the outlets reported on the film calling it a reboot, Tulloch used a different word, which indicates a potentially different sort of project. The actress posted…
Grimm fans - good news!! Spinoff in the works!
To be fair, the word reboot has been overused to the point that it has barely any meaning at all anymore. It’s used as a general catch-all to cover any sort of IP that has been seen as “over” that is now coming back. However, in general, it’s used to reference a new take on a property that isn’t connected to what came before, at least not directly. It might be set in the same world with new characters, or it could just take the same premise and tell a entirely new story.
However, “spinoff” means something quite different. It implies a direct connection to the story that came before. Spinoffs of other TV series are usually set concurrent to the events of the main show, but they could also function as sequels, making secondary characters of the original series the main character of something new.
Fans could expect some of the regular characters from the original series to appear in the new movie if it’s a spinoff. That would be less necessary if the film is designed to be a reboot, even if the new movie is set in a world where the events of the original series took place.
As it so happens, a Grimm spinoff was considered at NBC a few years ago. David Giuntoli gave it his blessing, but it ended up not going anywhere. It's unclear if that idea, which involved on a new female Grimm, has any bearing on this new concept.
Meanwhile, Bitsie Tulloch has never strayed too far from the Grimm fandom more recently. In fact, a couple years back, she co-hosted a Grimm rewatch podcast with two other cast members. With Tulloch responding to the news and calling it a spinoff, we may be able to surmise that she knows at least something about what’s going on with this new movie. If she is involved, then the movie certainly could be more of a spinoff than reboot.
I’m not necessarily rooting for one idea over the other. More Grimm, in whatever form it takes, has a lot of potential, so I’m excited for this idea, whatever it ends up actually being. And, now that I am thinking about this underrated show again, I'm going to go use my Peacock subscription to rewatch it.
