TV Shows Like Grimm
If you like Grimm, here are 12 similar TV shows — each with its current AI renewal verdict, so you can see which are still going and which have been cancelled.
NBC · Drama · Grimm is ended
Grimm works because it takes a familiar procedural setup and quietly makes it strange. Nick Burkhardt is a homicide detective in Portland, which is grounded enough, but the cases he catches are tied to a hidden world of creatures drawn from fairy tales and folklore. The show earns its audience by keeping one foot in a believable police precinct and the other in something weirder and more dangerous. That balance is the whole trick, and the series holds it for six seasons.
The best shows like Grimm
1. True Detective
Like Grimm, True Detective builds its murder investigations around detectives who carry a lot of personal weight, and the cases tend to reveal something ugly about the world beneath the surface of ordinary life. The anthology format means each season stands on its own, so the show rewards the same episodic commitment Grimm fans are used to. It is darker and more philosophical in tone, but if you liked Nick Burkhardt wrestling with what his role as a Grimm means for his sense of justice, this series asks the same kind of questions without the fantasy layer.
Stream on HBO Max, HBO Max Amazon Channel, TNT
Likely Renewed72%
2. 21 Jump Street
21 Jump Street shares Grimm's core tension of a cop whose job requires operating in two worlds at once, here going undercover among teenagers rather than navigating a hidden creature society. The show leans more into character and the awkwardness of its undercover premise than into mythology, but it has real heart and a strong ensemble. Grimm fans who enjoyed the precinct relationships and the procedural rhythm will find familiar ground here.
Stream on Amazon Prime Video, fuboTV, Peacock Premium, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Ended0%
3. Imperfect Women
Imperfect Women replaces the supernatural with something almost as disorienting: the discovery that people you thought you knew have been keeping serious secrets. A murder investigation drives the story, but the real subject is how a close friendship survives when the truth comes out, which is not unlike watching Nick Burkhardt reckon with what he cannot tell the people around him. The show is tightly focused and character-driven, a good pick for Grimm fans who gravitated toward the personal stakes over the creature-of-the-week plots.
Stream on Apple TV, Apple TV Amazon Channel
Ended0%
4. Carnival Row
Carnival Row is probably the easiest recommendation for a Grimm fan: a detective in a dark city, a series of murders targeting a non-human population, and a world where the boundary between the ordinary and the fantastical has collapsed entirely. The added wrinkle of the detective becoming the prime suspect raises the personal stakes in a way that echoes how Grimm regularly turned Nick's two identities against each other. If you want more fantasy built directly into a crime investigation, this is the place to start.
Stream on Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Ended0%
5. The Purge
The Purge series works as a companion to Grimm for fans who liked the idea that society has a violent, barely-contained underside that most people try not to look at directly. Set in a dystopian America where crime is legal for one night a year, the show follows characters forced to confront how far they will go to survive, which gives it a moral urgency that Grimm touched on when Nick had to decide what the rules of his hidden world actually demanded of him. It is more thriller than procedural, but the sense of a secret social order with its own brutal logic carries over.
Cancelled0%
More on shows like Grimm
Fans of Grimm tend to want a few specific things: a detective at the center of something bigger than any single case, a world with rules that reward paying attention, and a tone that takes its own mythology seriously without being po-faced about it. They are comfortable with genre blending. A straight police procedural often feels flat after Grimm, and pure fantasy can feel unmoored. The sweet spot is a show that uses crime or investigation as its engine but refuses to stay in realistic lanes.
The recommendations here hit that range. True Detective is the most tonally serious of the group, a neo-noir that folds philosophy and personal collapse into its murder investigations, and it rewards the same patience Grimm asks of viewers. Carnival Row is the closest structural cousin, pairing a detective plot with a full fantasy world and a murder mystery that implicates the investigator himself. 21 Jump Street takes the undercover-cop premise in a lighter, more character-driven direction, while Imperfect Women trades the supernatural for psychological tension among three women whose friendship fractures under the pressure of a murder investigation. The Purge is the outlier, a dystopian thriller that pushes the genre into darker, more allegorical territory, but fans who liked Grimm's sense of a society with a violent hidden layer underneath will find something to hold onto here.
None of these are perfect replacements, because Grimm's specific combination of fairy-tale lore and procedural routine is genuinely unusual. But each of them picks up at least one thread that made Grimm worth watching and pulls it somewhere interesting.
More shows like Grimm
Frequently asked
- What is the most popular show like Grimm?
- True Detective is the most popular show similar to Grimm in the IsItRenewed catalogue.
- Are shows like Grimm still on the air?
- Of the 12 shows similar to Grimm listed here, 0 currently carry a renewed verdict — the rest are cancelled, ended, or awaiting a decision.
- How does IsItRenewed pick shows like Grimm?
- The recommendations come from TMDB's similar-titles data, and each is shown with its current AI renewal verdict so you know which are still going.