2. Ditch the superfluous supporting characters or empower them.
Bitsie Tulloch is unquestionably the worst part of Grimm, and her character’s continued survival never fails to depress me. When the show started out, with Tulloch’s Juliette playing supportive girlfriend to Nick as he began to discover his abilities, I was almost certain that her character had an expiration date of episode six. After all, the death of his girlfriend at the hands of supernatural foes would be a suitable catalyst to get Nick jump-started on his destiny as a Grimm. Shockingly, three seasons in, Juliette is still alive and kicking (though you wouldn’t know it from Tulloch’s disinterested gaze).
Tulloch’s paltry acting abilities only strengthen the case for killing Juliette. Whenever she’s placed in mortal danger or at loggerheads with Nick, her painfully stiff delivery turns Grimm into a particularly egregious soap opera. The writers evidently didn’t notice this until after they’d written an entire amnesia arc for the character in season two. Turns out, the only thing worse than Tulloch’s chemistry with Guintoli is her acting in scenes without him. Her memory loss weighed down the season like stones in a swimsuit.
Perhaps the writers can empower her this season, letting the character use her veterinarian training to help Nick with cases, but I have little confidence that Juliette will suddenly become bearable. For Tulloch’s poor performance as much as the character’s ultimate expendability, Juliette falls firmly in the ‘Ditch’ category.
However, there’s still hope for another currently useless character: Hank Griffin (Russell Horsnby). Nick’s detective partner was on such an aimless trajectory last season that nobody noticed him even when they wrote Hornsby’s torn Achilles tendon into the story. Even while limping around on crutches, his role in the show did not change whatsoever. That says something about a character: currently, Hank is nothing to Nick but a handicap.
If the writers want to fix Hank, they can start by giving him more ‘showcase’ episodes like season one’s “Game Ogre,” which found Hank facing off against an almost-indestructible Siegbarste as Nick lay in the hospital following a brutal attack from the creature. Though Hank’s unfamiliarity with Wesen was the main point of that episode, a similarly Nick-lite episode could work doubly well now that Hank knows about his partner’s second job. If Grimm‘s writers really want to commit to the ensemble they’re setting up (Nick, Hank, Juliette, Monroe and Rosalee), they need to be prepared to have all of those members stand on their own two feet, not just Nick. Hank isn’t stupid, and the show would be making a mistake by treating him as such.
