I’m pretty sure I missed half the jokes here either because they’re too obscure or just too darn fast.
What it's about
In the deathly town of Grimsburg, whose slogan reads “If you lived here, you’d be dead by now,” an alcoholic detective helps solve murder mysteries while also dealing with his estranged family.
The take
Part Family Guy and part Gravity Falls, Grimsburg’s offbeat sensibility is nothing new to adult animation fans. It’s very much in line with other shows rooted in absurdist, pop-culture-based humor. But somehow Grimsburg feels more inaccessible and frenetic, which could be good if you’ve been wanting something niche and weird, but not ideal if you want to emotionally invest in a show long-term. Grimsburg is too busy churning out jokes and zingers that it fails to properly build its characters into people you’d root for and want to see more of. And it’s a shame, because, with more character-building and fine-tuning, I can see Grimsburg becoming a cult classic among cartoon fans. But as it is, it's too loaded with jokes for its own good.
What stands out
Fans of detective shows will get a kick of how they’re parodied in Grimsburg. Our anti-hero, Detective Mike Flute (Jon Hamm, who plays an alcoholic genius once more) conveniently goes into a mind palace-esque place to solve crimes, much like BBC’s Sherlock does, except there he encounters bizarre mostly unhelpful clues. Also represented are TV detectives’ uncanny ability to solve a crime by just sniffing the crime scene, their sky-high ego parading as enigma, and a truckload of unresolved family issues.
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