Magic, not Mess: Once Upon a Time Episode One

When Boyle pulled it out of the bag last month, we breathed a hearty, countrywide sigh of relief; he’d polished the national pride of the Diamond Jubilee back to its glistening best and deftly silenced all those who’d scoffed at his Tellytubbyland opening set in the process. But there were, inevitably, a couple of detractors amongst the flag-wavers and painted faces, poisonous to the pomp and patriotism of it all. Sporting or not, what some of us had had our fingers crossed for was a right British cock up. Yes, yes, yes, the helicopter bit was flawless and it was nice enough to titter at Mr Atkinson (who got drastically funnier when coupled with the image of bemused American spectators), but I bet we’d have wrung close to equal pleasure from the hours-long extravaganza if it had been one (royally) hot mess. Why? Because we’re warped like that. Call me cynical, but there’s a malicious satisfaction that comes from speculating on the screw-ups of others. Negative is the new positive. Mel B’s X Factor stint was hailed for one reason and one reason alone; she went baying for blood, Cowell-style, and tearing strips out of anything below-par is now one of our most revered past-times. Go harsh, or go home.

Always keen to wrangle DitB the prodigious popularity it deserves, I’ll admit that when I sniffed out shows this week I went looking for a stinker. With withering one-liners being such hot property, I needed something I could really go to town with and another ‘B+’ was off the table. Channel 5‘s Once Upon a Time seemed just the F-grader I was looking for; having waxed lyrical about fantasy-drama Grimm a few months back, I envisaged a comparatively scathing post that could slam OUAT and niftily reaffirm my waning interest in Grimm at the same time. Resourceful. 

Something old, something new: The series began with the wedding of Snow White and her Prince

The show’s premise alone, though, threatened to be an irritatingly slick snag. The series opened with the revival and betrothal of Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) to her Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), with their fellow fairytale favorites rejoicing in the union. When her Wicked Stepmother swept in unannounced at their wedding and vowed vengeance for her humiliation, Charming was quick to scoff at her warnings and, a few months on, Snow looked fit to burst with their first child. In a parallel universe (ours, fortunately), bonds bailsman Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison) was visited by the son she gave up for adoption ten years before, Henry (Jared Gilmore), and urged to return with him to his home town of Storybrooke. Things got a helluva lot more elaborate at this point, but suffice to say that cynic Emma turned out to be the daughter of Snow and her Prince. She had, said Henry, been cast out of their fabled world to protect her from the Wicked Stepmother’s curse: a dark magic that had trapped dozens of fairytale characters in in a US town, devoid of their memories and with no hope of getting their mojos back. Only Emma, Henry told her, could undo the Queen’s ensnarement and return the characters to glory, but only Henry, Emma told him, would believe such tripe. The outline, I’ll admit, reads less like an outline and more like a neoclassical Picasso, but it’s well worth getting your head around. Grimm took its strength from that inexplicable pleasure we get from raking over and reorganizing the familiar, and OUAT makes use of the same formula. There’s something irresistibly gratifying about a show whose characters we’ve already got the measure of; first episodes are too often juggling acts between hooking our interest for people we care nothing about and having them do engaging things, but OUAT, even more effectively than Grimm, had the luxury of working almost exclusively on the latter. 

Aside from its conceding a promising opener, OUAT’s plot just made plain good sense (honestly). It was intricate without losing its own thread, and original without being alien. Emma’s timely arrival in Storybrooke, as the biological mother of a distressed child a little disenchanted with her own lonely life, was entirely tenable; her being the ‘key’ to undoing the curse came off as secondary. That’s not to mention the rationale behind the former-storybook-ers’ new personas. Of course Rumplestiltskin was now a pawnbroker called Mr Gold; obviously Snow White had wound up as primary school teacher still flanked by people half her size, and it was only logical that the Wicked Stepmother was Henry’s adoptive mayoress mum. Despite all its tangles, the show didn’t once ask too big of a leap of its adult audience, which, when your basis is as other-wordly as this one, is quite something. 

Lady in red: Emma held her own

With such a liberal use of identifiable real-world characters, lead Emma could quite easily have come off as the weakest link; she was (bar Henry), the only one without a transcendental counterpart and, as such, asked for a little more legwork. In her own way, though, Emma did seem oddly familiar; here was the girly-but-feisty independent woman who’s become such a staple on our dramas, soaps and tubes; the city-girl who pays her own bills and still has cash to splash on looking good. For all her primped locks and tight leather jackets, though, Emma’s place in the plot kept her immune from becoming just a stereotype. She lost a chunk of her thorniness when her parentage became clearer, and her destiny as fairytale-restorer gave her the edge over the dozens of similarly blonde but ballsy leads (this is Snow White and Prince Charming’s daughter: even Buffy Summers can step down). When a little more of her (supposed) backstory came to the fore, Emma’s place at the helm seemed even more deserved. Her apparently being abandoned on the side of a road, a troubled childhood that saw her flip-flop in and out of care and an inability to tie down a boyfriend all did their bit in endearing her to viewers and ensuring she didn’t get lost amongst the would-be princesses and dragon slayers, whilst her selfless sticking around for fellow nobody-wants-me son helped her to usurp Snow White in the heroine stakes.

Perhaps the show’s biggest boon was that it didn’t feel much like a television show; in its scale, in its pace and in its conception, OUAT seemed born for the big-screen. Its movie-esque quality, which left me expecting, yearning for, a premiere three times its length, was afforded most by its dazzling visuals. Glossier than a Kim Kardashian pout and bigger than her backside, the show was an aesthetic as well as a logical triumph, and its costumes and scenery rivaled the big-leagues in Hollywood cinema (Rupert Sanders, watch your back). Crucially, though, the special effects were reigned in when they needed to be; the ‘real world’ scenes acted as stoppers to the spells and sorcery whenever it threatened to get a little stale but had enough of their own Swan-shaped action to remain visually commanding in their own right.

Wicked: 'Hilary Devey ain't got nothin' on me'

Mills’ performance topped those given by a sumptuous supporting cast (Robert Carlyle as Mr Gold/Rumplestiltskin was a tangibly close second), with her Jessie-J Stepmother just enough of a deviation from what you’d expect. True, the creators had given her a lot of scope with arguably the episode’s most instantly affecting figure, but the elaboration she brought to the role was something a director could never take credit for. Her is she/isn’t she evil, does she/doesn’t she know about the curse, will she/won’t she harm Henry dilemmas were strung out until the end, and she played each of them with enough mystique to remain enthralling but enough lucid hints to trick us into thinking we had it sussed.

With the plot, character and gloss boxes firmly checked, I wondered if I could at least slate the series’ use of fairytales as a touch rusty, as a moth-eaten way of playing it safe that didn’t allow enough progression. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Indeed, OUAT seemed to consciously position itself as a distinctly modern elongation of the classics, and to stress that it could function just fine if it were to shed the fable-element (it won’t have to if its keen enough to explore those around Snow and Prince in enough detail, and something assures me that it will be). The producers turned the fairytale format on its head more than once, having our world’s answer to Snow White, teacher Mary Margaret, tend to coma-patient and former Prince Charming, David Nolan, and Granny and teen Ruby (need I clarify?) running a B&B for waifs and strays. The feminist rewriting of our culture’s inherently patriarchal stories is easy to spot if you want to, but with a show that views so smoothly its almost a shame to get bogged down in it.

I might be one pig’s ear short of a scathing review, but in OUAT I’ve picked up a new telly favorite. Every cloud.