Fairy Tales Are About Hope, Once Upon a Time Producer

Another article about ABC's Once Upon a Time, but it also contains the producers' philosophy about fairy tales so I thought I would share. We are still two months away from the premiere, alas.

From Fairytales: Twisted:

TVA Plus: Once Upon A Time takes a very different look at fairytales and fantasy TV. How long has this idea been in gestating?

Adam: It’s been a long time. Eddie and I actually had this idea together about eight years ago. We were fairly new at the time so was probably not readily accessible for a couple of young writers. We love fairy stories and we always thought it would be fun to do a show that attacked them from a different angle and kind of used that as a jumping off point for something else.

Edward: When we were on Lost, it started to kind of click how we wanted to tell these fairy stories. We weren’t interested in retelling Snow White. Let’s start at the end of Snow White for instance. We will tell you what you’ve never seen before. We don’t want to retell Pinocchio; we want to tell you how Jiminy Cricket became homeless and sneaked into Gepetto’s workshop.

Also something else we picked up on, if you look around the world, no matter what country you’re in, no matter where you are, everyone is kind of grasping for hope right now. The reason I personally love fairytales, is the same reason why you buy a lottery ticket. It’s the belief that one thing can change your life.

The way that Lost is about redemption, this show is about hope. Storybrook kind of represents every town, represents everybody. We say it’s a town full of cursed people looking for hope, looking for their happy endings but that could be anywhere. If it’s Singapore, Hong Kong or Minneapolis, everybody feels like maybe I’m not where I want to be. And I feel like that’s kind of what our show is about.

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Adam: When you look at fairytales, a lot of them are terrifyingly dark stories. But when you look at them in terms of the context of which many of them were for, which were to teach children how to deal with the world and how to deal with their fears, those kinds of scary moments are the undercurrents of hopefulness and also paired with humour also.

Have I mentioned I am really, really curious about this series? And I hate ongoing storyline plots that may take seasons to resolve so this is saying a lot! I don't mind seasonal arcs, but leaving plot resolution to the vagaries of networks, actor changes, writers, etc. irks me no end. I don't trust it and won't get caught up in it willingly but this might convince me otherwise.

Anyway, I am happy with their philosophies on fairy tales, so I will be setting my DVR!