Jane Espenson

ABC 2011 Fall TV Premiere: Once Upon A Time

Once Upon A Time is one of the most unique new television ideas for 2011, and with former Lost producers on board as creators there’s hope that ABC’s new fairy tale can find the audience that Pushing Daisies never did. A little Neverending Story, a smidge of Lost, and a charm and style within the fairy tale world reminiscent of the short-lived, but brilliant, Pushing Daisies, Once Upon A Time has everything going for it. Everything, that is, except a boring generic courtroom or hospital background with cliché characters.

There may be cliché fairy tale characters in Once Upon A Time, but they’ve never been done quite like this. I admit that I’m going into what little information we have on the show with high hopes. But damnit, that’s what I expect from inventive television programming. Networks can cancel all the Fireflys, Pushing Daisies, and Chicago Codes they want. I still want original content, with a bit of wit and intelligence. Watching fairy tale characters that have forgotten who they are in our real world is just ripe for the metaphorical picking. It may be too much for the general audience, it may even end up being horrible, but for now I’m going to hold onto the fantasy that there’s something magical on the way to TV in Fall 2011.

Below is ABC’s synopsis for the series and further down are a few clips from the premiere episode:

From the inventive minds of ”Lost" executive producers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis comes a bold new imagining of the world, where fairy tales and the modern-day are about to collide.

And they all lived happily ever after - or so everyone was led to believe. Emma Swan knows how to take care of herself. She’s a 28-year-old bail bonds collector who’s been on her own ever since she was abandoned as a baby. But when the son she gave up years ago finds her, everything starts to change. Henry is now 10 years old and in desperate need of Emma’s help. He believes that Emma actually comes from an alternate world and is Snow White and Prince Charming’s missing daughter. According to his book of fairytales, they sent her away to protect her from the Evil Queen’s curse, which trapped the fairytale world forever, frozen in time, and brought them into our modern world. Of course Emma doesn’t believe a word, but when she brings Henry back to Storybrooke, she finds herself drawn to this unusual boy and his strange New England town. Concerned for Henry, she decides to stay for a while, but she soon suspects that Storybrooke is more than it seems. It’s a place where magic has been forgotten, but is still powerfully close... where fairytale characters are alive, even though they don’t remember who they once were. The epic battle for the future of all worlds is beginning, but for good to win, Emma will have to accept her destiny and fight like hell.