Crime noir is awash in tropes, from the femme fatale to the corrupt cop to the hard-boiled detective. The new FOX Entertainment series Grimsburg leans heavily on the latter, but that’s not what defines this animated send-up of the genre.
“There are definitely detective tropes that we hit, but we wanted to make sure [the show] was more about the character’s take on those tropes versus the tropes themselves,” says Showrunner and EP Chadd Gindin.
The character Gindin is talking about is Marvin Flute, a pot-bellied, middle-aged man with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. This disgraced police detective is called back to service to solve a seemingly unsolvable gruesome crime: a decapitated teenage boy and his missing girlfriend. While Flute may have the brains and gut instinct to figure out whodunnit, he’s clueless when it comes to his own estranged family.
While there is a different crime in every episode, Flute’s relationship with his ex-wife, Harmony, and son, Stan, is the throughline of the series. As the show was being developed, Gindin says, the creative team tried to figure out what degree of mystery was needed. Once they keyed in on that, they saw how the mystery could be the framework to tell personal stories.
This approach is a long way from the idea that sparked the series—Grimsburg was originally conceived as a live-action spoof on Nordic noir by Catlan McClelland and Matthew Schlissel. As various ideas were shed along the creative journey, the biggest question became: “Can we take this and turn it into a Fox animated Sunday night show?” says Gindin, noting that this is the point where he came onboard. “The goal once I joined … was to take [a premise] that was meant to be live action and turn it into something that could take advantage of what animation allows television shows to be—which is very different.”
Gindin arrived at Grimsburg from an eclectic background of animation, live-action sitcoms, and even live-action horror comedy-drama. But he says that from The Cleveland Show to The Santa Clarita Diet, he feels all these different ways of telling a story refined for him what the core of all good storytelling is.
“The hook doesn’t necessarily matter at the end of the day,” he says. “It’s the story that’s underneath it.” With Grimsburg, it’s the story of someone who’s good at all types of things but who can’t figure out his own problems and fix himself—something, Gindin feels, a lot of people can relate to: “The weirdness is the hook, but the story will make the show last forever.”
And weird it is. Flute is addicted to cough syrup and makes miniature mid-century modern furniture models in his spare time. Axe-throwing TV news reporter Harmony was raised by bears. Gindin calls the town of Grimsburg itself Fargo meets Twin Peaks meets Springfield, and everything bizarre about it can be pushed to the limit because the show is animated. “That was honestly the biggest draw of this,” Gindin says. Sure, he’s worked on a live-action show where a zombie wife eats people, but he says: “I got here and it was like, oh my God, you can do anything.”
Take Harmony and the raised-by-bears storyline. “If this was live action, you’d never see her parents,” Gindin says. “It would be very difficult to do the slashes on her face. Just as an expense, you would have the makeup, the stunt people, the wrangler for bears. Those are all things that are expensive in live action, [and] that’s just one tiny little piece of what this show is.”
Other pieces of the kooky Grimsburg puzzle include Detective Greg Summers, Flute’s partner and a cyborg. Flute’s son’s imaginary friend is Mr. Flesh, a skeleton with flames for eyeballs. “You make a lot of compromises in live action to get things done,” Gindin says. “In animation you can have an idea and execute it.” That idea can even be a “trainsion”—in one episode a murder takes place on a train that is also a mansion.
Gindin feels that one reason this kind of expansive creativity can happen is because in animation the whole team can be in on the solutions—in this case, it was the team at Bento Box. For example, a writer might write a funny scene, but then visual jokes will emerge and elevate the humor as the artists get to work.
While the script is tight with clever jokes, visual details play an important part in setting the show’s offbeat tone. Mr. Flesh may be an imaginary skeleton, but he always wears a scarf because he considers himself to be debonaire. Stylish Harmony’s accessories include an ear tag, from her childhood in the woods with the bears. Then there is Stan, who wants to be much cooler than he is. So, he wears a cape—but is it a cape? The little tag in the corner gives it away as a bath towel. According to Gindin, these kinds of things come from “so many pitching in and making [the show] great.”
For as weird as Grimsburg wanted to get, there were some guardrails guiding its way. Gindin says the design style of the show took a lot of time to figure out. “They needed something that didn’t look like anything else in the FOX Sunday night line-up, but at the same time it couldn’t be too different.” This was a big ask considering the line-up: The Simpsons, The Great North, Bob’s Burgers, and Family Guy. Each of these iconic shows is unique in style, and yet they all feel like integral piece of a larger whole. In this way—among many—Grimsburg succeeds. Not only does it pave its own noirish, ribald way, but it also goes with the Sunday night flow.
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