I don’t want the title of this post to give the wrong impression. I like Once Upon a Time, I’m fully rooting for it to succeed, I enjoy watching it, and I plan on continuing to watch for the foreseeable future. However, for some reason that I can’t quite pin down, I just don’t LOVE Once Upon a Time. Normally, this wouldn’t be all that unusual, except for the fact that this really is a show that I should absolutely freaking love. I am literally the target audience for this type of premise. I’m drawn to nearly anything on TV in the fantasy or science fiction genres. I’m certainly not all forgiving, but I tend to give a show a lot more leeway when it contains a strong genre element to it. In particular to Once Upon a Time, I’m a big fan of Fables, a fantastic graphic novel with a similar premise of fairytale characters living in the real world. I really enjoy this type of creative reimagining of fairytales, and I think the show has done a good job creating a fun mythology that mixes the familiar in with the new. I’ve also generally liked the things that the cast has done in the past, and I have nothing bad to say about them in this. And yet, when it comes to the finished product, it’s as if the whole of this show fails to add up to the sum of its parts.
There’s something intangibly off to me about the show. If I had to put it into words, it’s almost as if I can feel the effort being put in to making the show and that takes me out of the fantasy just enough to sour my enjoyment. Like I said, I tend to love science fiction and fantasy, so suspending my disbelief has never been a real issue for me.
It’s not one simple thing I can easily sum up, but one example of what I’m trying to get at may stem from the show’s two creators, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, being veterans of Lost, a show that used a very similar storytelling technique to Once Upon a Time’s fairytale flashbacks. I absolutely adored Lost (still do), and its biggest strength just may have been the way it employed flashbacks to bring its characters to life and give them real depth. The problem isn’t that Once Upon a Time’s use of flashbacks haven’t been successful; in fact I find myself much more interested in the reimagined fairytale flashbacks and the clever way the back story is slowly coming together in a non-linear fashion, than I am in the often dull happenings of Storybrooke. The problem, I think, is that instead of being sucked into a story about these characters, I feel like I’m watching a television show that’s trying to recreate the magic of Lost, and, when a television show reminds me that I’m watching a television show, well that’s a real problem.
All that being said, I do admit, I have found all this to be slightly less of a problem in later episodes than it was in earlier ones, so maybe the show is coming into its own or maybe I’m just becoming more acclimated to its style.
What do you think? Is anyone else out there watching this show and having the same problems? Different problems? Alternative theories about what’s off with the show? Or is this a great show and I’m simply over analyzing it? I’d love to hear from you.
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