cake1
Since: Feb, 2016
05/03/2016 00:00:00
Disney technically produced this show- they are affiliated with ABC. So I wasnt really surprised to see the characters taking inspiration from the Disney ones. This would have been fine if what I had initially liked about the premise hadn\'t devolved into pointless, convoluted drama in the later seasons much like what you describe here.
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Two Seasons in and I'm None the Wiser
Once Upon a Time is an example of a now commonplace premise - Fairy Tale characters trapped in the real world. Half way through season two of Once Upon a Time I looked at the Netflix episode list, and winced when I saw that I had only finished 35 out of 110 episodes. Well bother this nonsense. I am done. Here is the review.
OUAT is quite bad, and I am spoilt for choices for things to point at which don't work. I could blame the 90s videogame standards of CGI, or the obvious budgetary constraints that stand in the way of the ambitious scope of the show. Or the tonal gulf between actor's pantomime scene chewing vs the po faced drama. But as usual, the biggest faults come with the writing.
The show follows the wrong characters for a start. We are given Emma, Prince Charming and Snow White as the three central characters and you couldn't ask for a more boring, insipid bunch. Throw in the generic, precocious boy as a moral centre, and the drama comes to a complete stand still. All the fun and interesting character development is had by the two duelling antagonists, Rumplestiltskin and Regina. A smarter writer on the team might have sooner realised that the story should be just about these two, but the series doesn't seem to start coming around to that fact until part way through season two, by which time it is too late as we've got the baggage of these three established assholes to deal with.
The show inserts the actual fairy stories in a really peculiar way. There are constant flash backs to the fairy tale world, but these vignettes are shown in chronological order only within each specific episode. This becomes a problem as you soon lose track of the time line. "So is this after the time that Regina cursed so and so, but before Rumplestiltskin cured the curse for that other so and so? Or is it the other way around?" Who knows, it becomes bothersome to follow.
Then there is the other weird stylistic choice in that the Fairy Tale characters are obviously taking inspiration from the Disney cartoons. Non-fairy story characters, like Pongo and Mulan, even show up without explanation. If Disney was explicitly mentioned it might make some sense, but as they aren't, OUAT ends up looking like a derivative, lazy attempt to ride Disney's coattails. And it probably is.