First Impressions: Once Upon a Time

It seems like every season there are a couple shows that share a premise and this year there were actually two competing shows on ABC and NBC with the same idea. ABC resoundingly won the first battle between the sixties era drama with Pan Am being a more critical and commercial success while The Playboy Club flamed out with both and did not last a month. This week sees the debut of two more similarly themed shows based around fairy tales, with Grimm premiering Friday at 9:00 (look for my review later this week).

Where Grimm is simply a procedural whose perps just happens to come from children’s stories, Once Upon a Time is all in with its fairytale theme with half the story set in the mythical land and the other in present day Storybrooke, Maine where the fairytale characters live your average human existence. Confused yet (the show does come to us from writers on the Lost staff)? As the story goes, the Evil Queen (of Snow White Fame) cast a spell banishing everyone in the enchanted forest to the worst place where there are no such things and happy endings without any knowledge of their fairytale past: present day America (or purgatory, these are the writers of Lost). And the writer really hit that idea hard repeating just how much this life sucks making you wonder how much they hate their own lives.

But wait, it has been prophesized, by Rumpelstiltskin of all people, that the offspring of Snow White and Prince Charming would come back on her twenty-eighth birthday to rescue them from this horrible place. And wouldn’t you know in present day Boston, Jennifer Morrison (Urban Legends - Final Cut) is celebrating that very birthday when she is visited by a precocious ten year old saying he was the son she gave up a decade before and is apparently the only one in Storybrooke aware of the inhabitant’s pervious lives (maybe it is because he looks to be the only one who is actually ageing in the city which is why Snow White and her daughter look the same age; though not explained is why they look nothing alike or why Morrison is wearing a jacket out of the Thriller collection). One has to wonder in the Evil Queen excluded herself in the amnesia curse.

Much like the upcoming Grimm, the big flaw (aside from the laughably bad CGI) is that both shows take themselves too serious for a show about fairytale characters. It is hard not to cringe as scenes like present day Red Riding Hood is a slut. But shows really need to learn to embrace the cheese factor when updating stories like these to be successful.

Other modern day counterparts include Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin, Ramona and Beezus) is now a teacher. Prince Charming (Joshua Dallas, Thor), who was fatally wounded before the curse was set in now a John Doe in a coma at the hospital. Jiminy Cricket (Raphael Sbarge, Vision Quest) is a children psychiatrist. Rumpelstiltskin (Robert Carlyle, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands) “owns” the town, whatever that means. And naturally the Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla, Spin City) is in politics and the adoptive parent of Snow White's grandchild.

There are very few more likeable actors working today than Goodwin and Parrilla manages to make the real life mayor of Storybrooke scarier than the Evil Queen making modern day that much more interesting, but I am not sure how far the show can go unless it develops a funny bone.

Once Upon a Time airs Sundays at 8:00 on ABC. You will be able to stream episodes on Hulu. You can also download Once Upon a Time on iTunes.