“Magic always comes with a price.”
If there’s one thing predictable about television, it’s that 95 percent of shows come out of what is essentially a giant cookie cutter.
Family shows, lawyer shows, doctor shows, cop shows, detective shows, westerns …
It got especially silly in the ’70s with the (fill in the blank) detective shows. We had the fat detective (Cannon), the blind detective (Longstreet), the wheelchair detective (Ironside) and the elderly detective (Barnaby Jones), to name just a few.
Comedies were the same sort of formula, generally falling into one of two categories. First was the ones in which the characters were linked as either family or friends (Dick Van Dyke, Seinfeld, I Love Lucy) or by place or situation (Cheers, The Office, Mary Tyler Moore).
Every once in a while, shows that don’t fit the mold come along. Sometimes they’re not that far outside the paradigm. An office drama with political overtones. West Wing was on for seven years, and it eventually begat Madam Secretary.
Still, they weren’t that different.
Even the shows on cable networks that pushed the envelope — crime families (The Sopranos), undertakers (Six Feet Under) — were still in basically the same universe of reality.
That’s why it was really fascinating when ABC came out with “Once Upon a Time” in 2011.
Try and imagine the goofiest premise for a drama you can imagine, other than comedies like “Alf” or “Mork and Mindy,” which are essentially just family comedies, and you’ve got “Once Upon a Time.”
Imagine all the characters in fairy tales being yanked out of their world into our world with no knowledge of who they really are.
My lifelong friend Bill Madden and I used to have long phone conversations on the phone at the beginning of each television season and discuss which new shows we thought would succeed and which would fail.
We stopped doing that about 30 years ago, but I would bet a lot of money that both of us would have been wrong in 2011 if we discussed “Once Upon a Time.”
Both of us would have said it wouldn’t make it through a single season.
Well, it lasted seven years.
And while it was uneven at times, and made a horrible mistake going into its final season, I sort of enjoyed it.
I think it worked because it had two excellent female leads — Ginnifer Goodwin (“Big Love”) and Jennifer Morrison (“House”), who essentially played mother and daughter although they were essentially the same age.
If you want to give it a try, you may not find yourself watching all seven seasons. But Season One was pretty good and you can take it from there.
It is, at the very least, a show that didn’t come out of the cookie cutter.
And that’s good.