If you lived here, you’d be dead already.
Grimsburg is an American Animated Sitcom created by Catlan McClelland & Matthew Schlissel.It follows Det. Marvin Flute (played by Jon Hamm), who may be the greatest detective ever to catch a cannibal clown and correctly identify a mid-century modern armoire. But there's one mystery he still can't crack - himself. To do that he must return to Grimsburg and redeem himself in the eyes of his fellow detectives, his ferocious ex-wife and his lovably unstable son.
The show also features Rachel Dratch, Erinn Hayes, Kevin Michael Richardson, Alan Tudyk, Greg Chun, Wendi McLendon-Covey, and Kaniehtiio Horn.
It began airing on Fox in 2024. It was renewed in 2022 for a second season.
Tropes for the series:
- Alliterative Name: Wynona Whitecloud.
- Ambiguous Situation: Mr Flesh. He's Stan's imaginary friend, but he's also been shown interacting with physical objects, even when Stan isn't around. He's also able to be seen by other kids, and spends an entire episode hanging out with Harmony after she temporarily gains the ability to see him after getting high on Marvin's barrel-aged cough syrup.
- Beyond the Impossible: Flute manages to somehow do the chicken dance so well, he actually defies gravity and flies for a bit.
- Bloody Hilarious: The show is about catching killers, and boy is it not shy about showing the aftermath of their grisly deeds.
- Bookends: The killer of the first season finale is Chief Stamos, her son being the killer in the first episode.
- Captain Ersatz: Marvin's father in "Father Father Bang Bang" and his Sentient Vehicle Junior are parodies of Michael Knight and K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider.
- Childish Tooth Gap: Lil' Betsy has one as both a child and as an adult. It turns out she actually pulled out her adult front teeth with pliers to retain this appearance.
- Clark Kent Outfit: Kang is actually very muscular beneath his parka, which is really just a windbreaker and only looks poofy because of how jacked he is. Flute has the misfortune of finding this out right before a boxing match with him.
- Clear My Name: In "The Flute-itive", Marvin is framed for murder and goes on the run to find the one who did it.
- Complete Immortality: "Younger Games" has Kang revealing himself to be a centuries-old immortal being, although he prefers to keep this under wraps from the general public. Marvin decides to take advantage of this by making a hobby out of subjecting Kang to various things that would normally kill a person, claiming it won't ever get boring for him.
- Couch Gag: The slogan on the "Welcome to Grimsburg" billboard in the opening changes in each episode.
- Curse: It's revealed in a news report by Harmony that Grimsburg was cursed by a woman who was incompetently executed, which is why the town has so many murders.
- Cyborg: Greg Summers, as he had a serious accident with a carousel prior to the series.
- Dirty Old Man: Flute's father Mitchell hires beautiful young women right out of college/trade school as the mechanics for his car Junior, and on their 26th birthdays, has them led away in handcuffs as he fires them (presumably not to arrest them, but to make it 100% clear that he finds them "too old" to be working for him....despite the fact that he himself is elderly and shown dealing with dementia by the episode's events).
- Duels Decide Everything: In "Granddaddy Issues", Marvin and Kang are fighitng over Marvin dating Kang's great-great-great (etc.) granddaughter, so Marina sends them to human resources to settle their differences... in a no holds barred caged boxing match.
- Evil All Along: Chief Stamos is the Big Bad of season one, as she profited off murders in Grimsburg and brought Marvin back to town for her own agenda.
- Evolving Credits: The scene in the opening sequence where Marvin studies a miniature of a crime scene is changed on the first episode Season Two, with Marvin removing Chief Stamos, who was arrested in the season one finale, and replacing her with Marina. From then on, Marina remains in the miniature scene.
- Fantastic Ghetto: Grimsburg has so many murderous dolls and toy robots that a mayor ceded to them their own, walled off, section of town where humans are banned called Dolltown.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The world Grimsburg is set in has magic, sci-fi, and mundane but idiosyncratic elements, where in the titular town these fantastic elements trend towards murder mysteries.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: The town lawyer, Loni, is a woman from 1984 who fell through a rift in time and space while at the shopping mall.
- Fountain of Youth: Kang reveals that he drank from a river whose waters deages people and a river that ages them which locked him into the physical age he is and made him immortal.
- Groin Attack: In "Crystal Ball", Flute gets a testicular transplant that gives him the ability to see the future whenever he gets hit in the nethers.
- "Home Alone" Antics: Deconstructed hard on "Haunted Housewife". Stan sees a burglar casing his house and sets up a booby trap from the movie that swings a bucket into the burglar's face. Instead of just knocking him out, however, the bucket gets wedged into his skull, leaving him a bloodied, twitching mess.
- Imaginary Friend: Stan has one called Mr. Flesh, a skeleton with flaming eyes and a Camp Gay personality.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Mr. Flesh may be extremely crass and a bad influence on Stan, but he's shown to legitimately care about the latter.(to Harmony): "I'm chaos, not darkness."
- Large and in Charge: Chief Stamos completely towers over the rest of the cast, being so tall that in "The Danish Dilemma" she ends up banging her head on a parking garage light fixture.
- Like Father, Like Son: In "Daddy Daddy Bang Bang", we learn that Flute's father Mitchell abandoned him when he was a kid, and Flute spends the episode acting towards his father the way Stan usually acts towards him: blind admiration despite clear indifference from his father. Also, Flute clearly doesn't learn anything about being a better father despite this experience.
- Medium Awareness: The last scene of the first season has Marvin telling Summers they are in a TV show and are waiting for a second season.
- More Criminals Than Targets: Justified with the titular town, which despite being a small city has a comically high rate of violent crime. Apparently, it's because the town's been cursed since a mass virgin sacrifice during colonial times (although the town couldn't have been that peaceful to begin with, if they were performing mass sacrifices).
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The killer in “The Flute-itive” that Stan befriends is an obvious parody of Timothée Chalamet, with Marvin even calling him “Timothee Shallow Grave”.
- One-Word Title: Grimsburg and Pilot.
- The Place: The fictional town of Grimsburg.
- Popping Buttons: In the opening sequence, Marvin Flute is introduced looking trim, until the bottom button of his shirt pops, revealing a beer gut.
- Precision F-Strike: Summers drops one after meeting Flute's father and brother/his dad's car Mitchell and Junior.Summers: White families are fucking weird.
- Psychopathic Womanchild: Lil' Betsy, a Former Child Star who still acts the part despite now being old enough to have kids of her own. When a talk show host points this out to her several times, she snaps and stabs him to death.
- Raised by Wolves: Marvin's ex-wife Harmony was raised by bears, and she even keeps contact with her bear mother.
- Really Seven Hundred Years Old: Kang is actually several centuries old due to drinking a pair of potions that ended up giving him immortality.
- Shout-Out:
- In episode 3, Flute's crime-fighting alter-ego "McSnuff the Mystery Mutt" is a clear parody of McGruff the Crime Dog.
- "Camp Slasher" is almost entirely built on references to Friday the 13th (albeit using a version of Jason from the second movie, with the burlap sack rather than the hockey mask). One scene even features a reference to the famous ending of the first movie where the slasher takes Marvin from a boat.
Marvin: Let's go up there and catch that guy.
Kang: Oh we caught him already, but the slasher returned. Then the slasher lived. And a final chapter, a final revenge, and a final beginning. After he took Manhattan we had to shut the camp down.- Stan uses his knowledge of Minecraft to help his grandmother build a dam to catch fish.
- Season 2 has episodes that are direct parodies of M3GAN and Knight Rider.
- In "Loosey Goosey", Adelaide's scissors from Over the Garden Wall can be seen on display at City Hall.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: The man running the town's used appliance store is absolutely NOT Tom Petty, hiding years after his supposed death. Nor is his assistant manager Prince. Really.
- Take That!:
- In "The Big Trouble with Lil' Betsy", Lil' Betsy's defense attorney demonstrates how easily videos can be tampered with by showing doctored footage of Seth Rogen declining pot.
- Mr. Flesh compares Stan's parents to Ezra Miller in "The Danish Dilemma".
- "Crime Con" has one to Netflix docu-drama that usually glamorizes criminals.
- Thing-O-Meter: In "Loosey Goosey", Kang accuses Flute and Martinez of killing the office vibe he's worked so hard to maintain. When Flute says there's no such thing as a vibe, Kang produces a vibemeter that gives a reading of two.
- Uplifted Animal: In "Loosey Goosey", the Mayor had tried to give a wild goose human intelligence as an attraction. It escaped, wanting to become a normal goose again. When Flute and Martinez find it, it not only talks but uses telekinesis to steal Flute's gun and handcuff them together so he can get revenge on the Mayor.
- Wedding Episode: "Say Yes to the Death" has the Grimsburg PD going undercover at a wedding to stop a serial killer who goes after whoever catches the bouquet. Things get complicated when Marvin and Harmony, who both crash the wedding, get in a competition to see which of them is the "fun one".
