Monday night, one of my favorite new shows from last fall, Grimm, kicked off its second season. A fun twist on typical crime dramas with monsters!

If you haven’t watched last season, I’ll do my best to summarize without including spoilers.

The show takes place in Portland, OR. Now, if you know anything about Portland, OR, you know that they pride themselves on being a bit… off. There are even bumper stickers out there that say “Keep Portland Weird”. It’s really a wonderful town for such an interesting show.

We follow Nick Burkhardt, a detective with the Portland PD. Nick has been living a pretty normal life. He’s a good detective–nothing too remarkable. When he was a child, he lost his parents in a car accident, so he’s grown up with his Aunt Marie.

Well one day Nick starts seeing things. He looks at people and watches them change very subtly into nightmarish beast-things before his very eyes. The only problem is… no one else sees this happening. Unsure of what’s going on, Nick keeps this to himself.

One night, his Aunt Marie shows up for a visit. After figuring out Nick’s strange situation, she shares the reason: Nick is one of the last Grimms. An old family of people who would hunt and kill beasts that normal people didn’t even know existed in real life. Each episode following brings new challenges and new beasts for Nick to handle and learn about, and each includes a fun twist on a known “Brothers Grimm” tale.

So here’s where the spoiler curtain goes up for a few paragraphs. If you like what you’ve read so far, go check out the first season. Tuning in now would be a disservice and only result in confusion. If you’re still undecided, jump to the end of the spoiler curtain.

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Alright, so this season we open up with the massive cliffhanger from last season. Kimura is in Nick’s house and they’re going at it. Nick, in a fit of rage, takes the upper hand in the fight, knocking Kimura around like a rag doll.

Suddenly, a new challenger approaches! A woman shows up who appears to be fighting Nick. After a bit of back and forth, she calls him “Nicky”. We then learn that she is, in fact, Nick’s mother.

Whew… that’s a lot to process over the few months we’ve had before season 2.

Kimura is knocked out by Nick’s mother, and they go about attempting to catch up. Meanwhile, another murder has happened and Nick needs to be on the case. During all of this, Juliet is still in a coma for unknown reasons, but we know Adelinde the Hexembeast was involved.

Nick’s mother seems to have information on his newest murder and informs him that this particular kind of Vessen is not to be taken lightly. It’s deadly, dangerous, and cunning (and apparently cat-like). Very few people have the pull to send one of these after him, so she determines that someone very powerful wants Nick dead. Presumably for the coins that Nick has taken possession of.

There’s a bit of bonding between the two, including a reunion hug that even had me audibly b’awwing. I won’t go into much more detail because if you’ve seen it, you know where I’m going, and if you haven’t seen it, then what are you doing?! Go watch it!

Alright, the spoiler curtain can go back up right about here.

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Grimm really impressed me last year. The characters were fun and the topic was a refreshing take on crime dramas that have been flooding the networks for years. But that all takes a back seat to Grimm’s greatest asset. Grimm doesn’t take itself too seriously.

The big mistake you can make with a show like this is to take yourself too seriously. Expecting the audience to accept that this world of Vessen is going on around them is just not going to happen, and Grimm knows that. They regularly crack jokes regarding how impossible all this seems, the support cast is surprisingly human (especially considering some of them aren’t supposed to be– hyuk hyuk hyuk), and there are genuine, light-hearted moments of character development around all of this. It really maintains the balance quite well.

If you haven’t seen this show, I urge you to check it out. It’s not going to win any awards. It’s not going to take the networks by storm like a Breaking Bad or Walking Dead, and it certainly doesn’t compete with big-name shows like all the CSI’s and Law & Order’s, but it’s a consistent fun hour of television every week.