Unless, of course, you consider the role of women in the television show. Then yes, it’s far grimmer than I could ever have imagined!

Maybe I’m just disappointed because I was so impressed with Once Upon a Time and I was expecting bigger things. Maybe I’m just a feminist who would like to, you know, see women portrayed as strong, central characters representing the role we already portray in life. Either way, Grimm isn’t exactly what I thought it would be—and not in a good way, either. (Beware: spoilers ahead.)

First of all, it’s not really that scary or grim. I was envisioning some of the true horror we felt when we read the real Grimm’s fairytales as children coming to life, and I was very excited about it since we rarely, if ever, are exposed to such tales in life. Instead, they are made over with flowers and singing animals and doe-eyed heroines who live happily ever after. Whatever happened to the monstrous parents who hack their children up, only to have their ghosts come back and haunt them or who come back to life to have them murdered in return? Those were truly Grimm stories!

Instead, this show gives us cookie-cutter CSI episodes with a slight fairytale twist that has yet to be very scary or even interesting. If a man’s torn-off arm, a wolf with several red cloaks in his closet, and a mother bear stabbed through various parts of her body are meant to be shocking and scary, well, they’re just not.

The lack of strong female roles in the film is also very apparent. The only female protagonist we’ve had, an aging cancer victim who can surely kick ass when it comes to fighting bad guys, dies in the second episode. Really? We have one interesting, awesome woman and you’re going to kill her off already? How…predictable. And ogling a woman’s ass was explicitly referred to in the very first episode, which is also so promising—no, I mean predictable, yet again.

The rest of the women in the show are either victims or would-be victims. The only two women who aren’t are two-dimensional villains. I am really hoping that this will change (it’s been indicated that there are more “Grimms” out there; surely some of them are female) but I won’t hold my breath.

The falsely-accused wolf is entertaining so far, at least, and I do love the idea of Grimm detectives—The Sisters Grimm, anyone? Perhaps Michael Buckley should have been consulted prior to the airing of this show.