During my perusing of something new to do (after finishing another marathon of a Korean drama rom-com), I suddenly had the urge to check some other old television series classics (or at least the cult favorites). That eventually lead me to remembering a series that my friend had brought up a while back that I had intended to check out, but got side tracked with other things instead.
Once Upon A Time is currently airing on ABC and has a little modern-day slash fantastical Fairy Tale twist (Yes, Fairy Tale MUST be capitalized). For a summary on the series itself, feel free to Google it, but for a quick down low, basically, Emma Swan is brought to a place called Storybrooke when her long ago given up son comes tracking her down. He's got this wild imagination that all the people of Storybrooke are trapped in a curse and that Emma is the only person who can save them. Running parallel to the modern setting is said Fairy Tale wherein all the Storybrooke characters are introduced through various episodic story arcs as their Fairy Tale counterparts.
To be totally honest, for a better summary, you wouldn't be reading my version, because while I'm kind of enjoying this little adventure, I'm not quite certain I know what's really going on aside from the curse and Emma Swan's role in breaking it.
We are told that the entire Fairy Tale debacle is quite real through that parallel telling, slipping back into the Fairy Tale back story while moving right along with the modern day Storybrooke version. But as you flip back and forth, part of you can't quite keep from wondering whether or not this Fairy Tale and curse might not really be a figment of young Henry's overactive imagination -- maybe he IS compensating for his loneliness by creating a fantastic world simply because, as he says in Episode Five, "There's gotta be more to it." (Or something like that, because I'm terrible with quotes, so forgive me.)
I didn't start getting into the series until about Episode Three when we back-pedal into the brief "How Snow White met Prince Charming" love line. And to be totally honest, I'm kind of digging the Fairy Tale story line more than the Storybrooke telling -- I guess I'm just a sucker for Fairy Tales and some adventure. Without this parallel story telling, it would be quite hard to suspend that disbelief that everyone in Storybrooke could be Fairy Tale characters who just don't know it because of a curse that has kept them suspended in a prison of time standing still without their memories. It's a long shot, but I think with more development, the series will come together.
Ginnifer Goodwin does a rather good bumbling Mary Margaret Blanchard as the Storybrooke version of the character, but then she switches gears pretty quickly to become a rather kickass Snow White for the Fairy Tale version of herself. Good touch.
The only complaints I have are the CG and magic illustrations, which look pretty awkward and comedic (it's not a good kind of comedic). The Fairy Tale world is a bit of a "fusion" of American cultural tones (from speech to analogies) which gives it a pretty interesting spin.
My hope: That this series doesn't end up dragging itself out like the typical American television series does (for five seasons with extensions). After spending so much time with Asian series, there's much to be said about having a finite quality for many, many story lines, television series included. The one thing that American series suffer from is their lack of a defining ending that hadn't been brought about by dropped ratings or loss of new material to write about. For this reason, some series would probably do much better as a mini-series while sometimes there ARE series that have it in them to be ongoing for four or five years.
Once Upon a Time, unfortunately, can only be taken so far before the writers run out of ways to continue on without solving the main issue. So, like it or not, this is one of those series that would do well as one with a projected ending rather than a hoped for extended, ongoing series with multiple seasons.
But what do I know. I just watch for entertainment and the series will entertain me until... well, until it stops entertaining me. Then I move on to other things.
***
Still continuing on with reading Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston. It's getting exciting, but there are some complaints I have about it, which I don't quite know how to pinpoint yet. I've put A Great and Terrible Beauty on hold for the time being as it just wasn't drawing me in. But I need to finish reading it when I get the chance, if only because I want to tell all the people who recommended it to me as "an awesome book" that I just didn't enjoy it. Because, as I mentioned to a friend, so far, aside from the attention to detail in the author's writing style (some cute little analogies and the female lead's cynical sarcasm) I'm not quite sure I'm getting what's going on.
It wasn't like reading The Hunger Games where I suffered from a "Let's read one more chapter then go to sleep" dilemma, where about six hours later, I've done gone through ten more chapters and am already more than halfway through the book when I'd just started reading it.
Anyway, I guess that's life.
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