‘Once Upon A Time’ Improved Fairy Tales As We Know Them

When Once Upon A Time premiered back in October 2011, the premise alone was enough to make it an immediate hit. Take all the fairy tale characters you’ve always known and loved and then throw them together in a town created by a dark curse cast by none other than the Evil Queen. Then throw in a Savior in the form of the long-lost daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, as well as a little boy named Henry with the heart of the truest believer (who just so happened to be the son of the Savior and the Evil Queen) and you’ve got the makings of some pretty magical TV—pun totally intended.

While the critical reception of the first season of the ABC series was somewhat mixed, the fan reaction was overwhelmingly positive. From Funko Pop figures to conventions to NC-17 fanfiction, Once Upon A Time has always had a dedicated and passionate fanbase that understood and appreciated the strong messages of the importance of hope, family, love, and redemption that the show so vehemently pushed in the early days. It was a refreshing change to the usual primetime TV shows, mixing Disney wish danger and adventure—not to mention two strong, powerful women in Regina Mills/The Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla) and Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison), who, despite being mortal enemies, found a way to undress each other with their eyes at every available opportunity.

Granted, the show has certainly faltered since then, with its many missteps—queerbaiting, tokenism, trying to turn a toxic relationship into its main romance, and downright bad storytelling at times—costing it millions of fans and any hope at decent ratings. While the last batch of episodes have certainly helped to repair some of the damage caused by its earlier scripting, the fact of the matter is that Once was too far gone by then for most to care.

Still, we’d be remiss not to celebrate all the wonderful things that made the series something worth being so passionate about in the first place. While most of us were familiar with the stories of Snow White, The Evil Queen, Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and the like, Once brought those 2D characters to life, assigning them backstories rife with struggles, triumphs, heartbreak and happiness which added context to their Disney versions. Suddenly, the Evil Queen’s nefarious ways weren’t senseless violence so much as misdirected pain from a decades-old betrayal. Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming’s (Josh Dallas) love wasn’t random, it was fate between a bandit and a commoner disguised as his dead twin’s royal counterpart. These details demonstrated just how good Once writers could be when they put their minds to it.

More than just adding a little umph to our Disney heroes and villains, Once found a way to intertwine their stories in such wildly creative and brilliant ways, in effect weaving one complete world they all inhabited rather than the separate and disparate ones we’d all long imagined. Rumpelstiltskin (Robert Carlyle) and The Evil Queen are connected via Regina’s mother, the ruthless Cora (Barbara Hershey), who learned magic from the Dark One years before Regina was born. Rumpel also becomes the Beast to Belle’s (Emilie de Ravin) Beauty, the two characters forming one of the most popular ‘ships on the show in Rumbelle. The Wicked Witch (Rebecca Mader) turns out to be the Evil Queen’s long-lost sister and Peter Pan is revealed as Rumpelstiltskin’s father.

If the synapses in your brain as misfiring due to all of this information, don’t worry—even Once‘s fans were often left feeling similarly. While interweaving character histories and fates was one of the show’s greatest strengths, it occasionally became its weakness as it became bogged down by extraneous details and B-plots that seemed to serve no greater purpose. Still, it’s hard to fault showrunners Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz for their grand ambition—there’s a laundry list of plenty of other, more heinous offenses they’d be better off answering to first—even if it did come off as a bit clunky from time to time.

While no one would argue that this was the right time for Once to take its final bow, the show still has much to celebrate in terms of its accomplishments over the years. When it was good, it was fantastic, and with incredibly talented actors like Parrilla, Carlyle, and Morrison (in the early years, anyway) on board, elevating even a mediocre storyline was that little bit easier. The source material meant Once was limitless in scope, and while the powers that be undoubtedly squandered many of its greatest gifts, for a while there, it made camping out in front of the TV on Sunday nights that much more enjoyable.

Jennifer Still is a writer and editor from New York who cares too way much about fictional characters and spends her time writing about them.

Where to stream Once Upon A Time