I just recently finished watching the final episodes of the past season of ABC’s Once Upon a Time. This series is one of the ones that lingers in my DVR queue for much too long, always tempting me to just delete it away. But then I watch an episode and am sucked into its fantastical universe for another 40 minutes and walk away not overly upset that I sat watching its narrative unfold.
I’ll watch anything from the makers of Lost and so that’s why I originally tuned in. I also like fairytales well enough to be intrigued by adaptations. As someone who writes on temporal play, I enjoy the duel storylines that each episode provides: a look into the characters in the present (refuges from a magical land living in the “real” world in a town called Storybrooke) and in the past (back in the Enchanted Forest, among other places, where they lived out their lives in their “normal” fairytale character roles).
There’s enough in the story to like, so I’m not sure why I’m always flirting with the idea of abandoning the show. There is the classic character you love to hate (the Evil Queen) who always has the potential of turning good (due to the love she has for her adopted son); there is a cute kid at the center of the action (Henry was the first person to realize that the seaside Maine town was really comprised of princesses, witches, fairies, and more – fantastical creatures who simply couldn’t remember who there really were due to a curse); there are love stories (callbacks to classic tales such as Beauty & the Beast and Snow White); and more importantly, there are abundant allusions (and reenactments) of the narratives we grew up on as children. Perhaps it’s the latter that I really like: seeing how the writers are going to portray Lancelot, Mulan, Pinocchio, Captain Hook, and others. And, as important, how they will blend such diverse imaginary figures and lands together.
And so I watch. Some storylines hold my attention better than other. The one that season two ended on was relatively intriguing: a duo with ties to a secret organization came to Storybrooke to rid the human world of magic. As they tortured the Evil Queen and spouted out comments about how those people “didn’t belong here,” my post-9/11 media detector went off. Magical persons as “Other”… an organization developed to abolish them… Interesting, indeed.
Of course, to be fair, I already had connected the trend of fairytales-gone-tv to 9/11. (Once Upon a Time is not an anomaly, NBC’s Grimm – a crime procedural loosely revolving around the Grimms’ Fairy Tales – is also enjoying its second season). And I’m not the only one to see this as a possible ripple effect of 9/11. To be clear, fairytales have existed in all documented time periods. (And my favorite fact is that almost every region on earth has its own relatively ancient version of the Cinderella tale). But despite the genre’s longevity, certain time periods do seem to revive it. The last decade has been one of them. Besides for the television shows mentioned above, fairy tale film adaptations have been plentiful as of late. To name just a few: Red Riding Hood (2011), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), and Mirror, Mirror (2012). And it wasn’t until post-9/11, in 2002, that the princess craze really infiltrated the children’s market with the launch of the Disney Princess lines. Did 9/11 amplify our desire for escapism? Can the fairytale boom be connected to the explosion of narratives centering around other fantastical creatures (like vampires that sparkle in the sunlight)? Are they similar to all of the “hero” narratives that proliferated after the terrorist attacks (from television dramas like 24 to comic book adaptations like Batman)? Are they a product of the economic times (do castles and buried treasure appeal to us in this time of recession)? Or are we simply hungry for any story that promises us a “happily ever after”? I’m not sure that any of the above reasons fully explain the trend but at least it gives television scholars like me a new genre to analyze on the small screen.
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