TV Series Review, Review

"Once Upon a Time" Review: How the Magic Ran Out

For a few seasons, Once Upon a Time was appointment television: a clever twist on fairy tales, beautifully dressed, with Robert Carlyle stealing every scene. Then the writing went thin, the stories started looping, and by its final season it barely resembled the show it started as.

The cast of "Once Upon a Time" (2013). Image: ABC

What a waste. When this started, it was genuinely addictive, and it made the most of a brilliant idea. Take the fairy tales everyone grew up with, turn them inside out, and give each one a fresh spin. The early seasons clearly loved doing that. I never missed an episode, and it was often the best part of my week.

The pedigree helped. Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz came to it from Lost, and you can feel that show's habit of splitting every episode between two worlds and letting a flashback reframe the present. Here the two worlds are the Enchanted Forest and Storybrooke, a small Maine town full of fairy-tale characters who've forgotten who they are. The pilot pulled in nearly 13 million viewers, and for a while it earned them.

It Looked the Part

The first thing that made the early seasons work is how good it looked. The sets and costumes are colourful and full of atmosphere, never too gloomy, never gaudy, and never off the shelf. It's beautifully shot, the makeup fits every character, and at its most fantastical, the effects hold up well.

Storybrooke itself is Steveston, a fishing village in Richmond, British Columbia, and the production reportedly hid brightly coloured objects around town to keep it looking muted and under a spell. That's the level of care I mean.

My one real complaint about the look is Ginnifer Goodwin's Snow White wig, which is some of the worst hair styling I've seen on screen.

The music, though, is haunting and ethereal, and Mark Isham uses it cleverly, with a main theme that sticks.

Writing That Once Had Real Layers

In the early seasons, the scripts managed funny, moving, and tense all at once, and the plots were layered, gripping, and a lot of fun. The characters were the real achievement: they felt like people with problems you could recognise, not just archetypes in costume.

Spotting who was who was half the pleasure. Working out which Storybrooke resident was which fairy-tale figure, and how the show had twisted them, was a game in itself.

Carlyle Carries It, Morrison Doesn't

The cast always did its best with whatever it was handed, and a lot of that material was good.

Robert Carlyle as Rumplestiltskin is brilliant, and I'm a fan. He plays both halves, the giggling imp in the Enchanted Forest and the menacing Mr Gold in Storybrooke, and he's the one performance that never dipped, however weak the script around him got.

Jennifer Morrison, on the other hand, was the wrong choice for Emma Swan. Her expression barely changes from one scene to the next, which is a problem when she's the lead and the story is meant to be about her opening up. Everyone else is fine.

Where the Magic Went

Somewhere along the way, the show ran dry. I never had an issue with the cast (except one), the music, or most of the production. The writing was the problem, and at its worst, it was bad enough that I nearly quit. I stayed to be fair to it, and because I was curious where it was going.

It's a shame to watch writing that was once layered and sharp turn cheesy and thin. The storylines began repeating themselves and tangling into knots. Some subplots were just odd; some never got a proper resolution; others made no sense or added nothing.

Part of it, I suspect, is ownership. ABC is Disney, and from season 4 the show started folding in Disney films wholesale, beginning with Frozen. The early seasons took old fairy tales and reinvented them. Later seasons increasingly borrowed recent films and repackaged them, which is much less interesting.

The characters suffered most. They lost the shading that made them relatable and fun, and their choices started to look strange and, at times, flatly illogical.

I've said most of the production stayed strong, and it did. The effects are the exception: over time they stopped being special, and at their worst they look cheap.

A Different Show Entirely

The final season barely resembled what came before. It jumped to a new city with a grown-up Henry and most of the original cast gone, including Jennifer Morrison, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Josh Dallas. It was effectively a soft reboot wearing the old title.

The audience noticed. The pilot drew nearly 13 million viewers; season 7 averaged around 3.4 million, down almost three-quarters. The show just ended after seven seasons and 155 episodes, and by then it had long stopped feeling like the one I'd fallen for.