My friend George recently suggested I watch Grimm, a sort of Law and Order-meets-Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show about a Portland cop with the ability to see the fairy-tale monsters who live, disguised, among us. (As in, the Brothers Grimm, get it?) We’re both connoisseurs of bad TV, and because we are both temporarily in long-distance relationships (his girlfriend is in another city for work; my boyfriend is abroad on a research grant) we have a great deal of time to watch them. You know, the thing that struck me about the show—more than its absurd supernatural premise; more than the cheesy creatures and special effects—was that in almost every episode, our cop hero shoots someone to death. Yes, they’re monsters, wolf-men and pig-men and snake-men and so on, but their monstrousness is part metaphor for criminality, and while the precise timeline of an episodic series is a little tough to pin down, it’s hard to avoid the sense that this detective is aerating uncharged suspects something like every other week.