Once Upon a Time: There is hope yet for television!

As movies have gotten more formulaic and... well... bad, television has gotten more formulaic and... well... bad. It's a strange thing, because movies have an opportunity to offer something really entertaining, deep and meaningful in a short amount of time that doesn't allow for fluff. Inception is a great example of a movie that understood this, was written well, and widened the audience's perception of the world. It got people talking. Tree of Life has done the same thing in a very different way. Even if a film is unpopular it hardly can have an excuse for being unthoughtful. Yet, we have Green Lantern, Hangover II, and a barrage of other crappy movies that don't so much make you think as they kill your brain cells with mindless action and a plot that seems thrown together at the last second.

Television has the opposite problem. This is because it is built to be repetitive. Every week a show comes on and many of the ones that work have to follow some sort of structure. Seinfeld was a brilliant show because it didn't pretend to be more than it was: funny situations in the ordinary lives of some eccentric but not unbelievable people. The Simpsons has been doing a similar thing now for over twenty years. The reason so much of television is so awful is because it has now adapted this repetitive model and tried to be more than it is--which often isn't much to start with.

The really ambitious televisions series are ones that understand the structure and say, "Hey, we can be better than that!" LOST is probably the best example, though in the end it failed to be coherent. J.J. Abrams understood how to make a "mystery box" but he could not finally demonstrate that the LOST mystery box had anything substantive inside.

I became disenchanted not just with LOST but all of television when that series came to a close. I thought that maybe it was impossible for a show to actually offer the kind of deep meaning that I'm looking for; it seemed that all television series can do is make money and go on and on until they are no longer appealing. In such a desert-landscape, one might as well watch The Real World or Basketball Wives--it is certainly as meaningful as much of anything you'll see on network television. Maybe television was never meant to make us think; maybe it was just meant to entertain. That seems to be the overwhelming sentiment among couch potatoes these days.

So here I was in this muck. Lately I've been watching TV again--too much TV in fact--and I've been disappointed. Some is entertaining; most is somewhere between awful and unwatchable. But in this period I've been holding out hope and searching for something that gives me more, something that feeds me. It didn't seem likely this season. Terra Nova is entertaining but lacks depth; House is fun but doesn't get me thinking; Survivor is, well, Survivor. Warehouse 13 was my favorite discovery by far, but its brilliant characters don't make up for being a sci-fi series for whom depth takes a backseat to techno-wizardry (albeit in a unique and surely brilliant way).

Then, yesterday, I found it. A friend pointed me to imdb.com where they had the series premiere of Once Upon a Time in full the day before it airs (Sunday on NBC). I watched, skeptical for about half the episode, before realizing that this was brilliant. The project of a couple of the writers from LOST, Once Upon a Time doesn't work with an empty mystery box--you may very well guess the ending from the first episode! Instead, it does what fairy tales do best: it allows us the opportunity to reflect on the truth of their stories. Yes, it's entertaining; yes, it's well-acted and the filmography is wonderful; but it's even more than that. It has the potential to be a television program with heart that isn't afraid to tackle a big question: "In what do we hope?"

Watch it. Share it. Think about it.