Animated show Grimsburg debuts on Fox Sunday, January 7, following an NFL doubleheader. The show, about a detective who returns to his hometown to solve a couple of mysteries that have always eluded him, including his ex-wife and son, has some big names attached. Jon Hamm voices Detective Martin Flute and is an executive producer, and Gail Berman, former president of Fox Entertainment and Paramount Pictures, is an exec producer too.
Berman shared how the Grimsburg script landed on her desk, and grabbed her in a way a script had not since her days at Fox back in the 2000s. She mentioned Malcolm in the Middle as the last show script to land with that kind of thud. “It was an unusual situation … where something came across the desk that was just kind of undeniable,” she said, “And this was like that.”
Berman sees Grimsburg as “a take on Nordic murder mysteries,” such as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Grimsburg is way more tongue in cheek, but shares a similar “offbeat tone” as the Nordic books and films, Berman said.
“Grimsburg is a place where a lot of bad stuff happens, but it’s also people finding themselves in the office, finding moments where they can come together,” she said. “It has a family notion to it, as most animated shows do. It’s also an office comedy as well as a personal comedy. Marvin is trying to not only get his badge and his job back, he’s also trying to get his family back.”
Hamm, who of course played Don Draper on Mad Men, also plays a law-enforcement officer on the new season of FX series Fargo. He told B+C the two characters don’t have much in common other than their line of work. “I wouldn’t draw too many parallels between my animated character and [his Sheriff Tillman character on Fargo],” he said.
A review in The Wall Street Journal called Grimsburg dark and peculiar — “a cartoon that is definitely off-limits to the Cocomelon set, or even Bluey fans, and which might go so far as to put Simpsons devotees on edge, although the violence is no worse than The Itchy & Scratchy Show, if Quentin Tarantino were directing. Casual mayhem aside, there is so much going on — so many visual gags, puns, obscure pop-cultural citations and pure weirdness for weirdness’s sake — that a viewer might not absorb it all until he or she watches it twice. Which I found myself happy to do.”
Fox has ordered a second season of the show. Catlan McClelland and Matthew Schlissel created Grimsburg and co-executive produce alongside showrunner Chadd Gindin. Hamm executive produces along with Berman and Hend Baghdady of The Jackal Group, and Connie Tavel.
After its special preview January 7, Grimsburg moves into its regular time period Sunday, February 18.
Berman called Grimsburg “really fresh.”
“I don’t think you’ve seen anything like this in the animated space at all–it’s very contemporary,” she said. “It’s filled with a lot of interesting characters with interesting problems.”
Besides being the series name, Grimsburg is the place that Detective Flute returns to to solve some age-old personal mysteries. “It’s a place far, far away,” said Berman, “where a lot of very unsavory things happen, very unpleasant things happen.”
