Once Upon a Time - Pilot, S01E01

I love fairy tales. Always have, probably always will. And so I am on board to watch this show. Yet I wasn't as thrilled with the pilot as I had hoped. Perhaps we need to wait a few more episodes until we really get into things. Really great stories sometimes need a bit of a runway to bring them up to full speed.

Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison) I loved. Okay, I wasn't wild about the name, since swan is just a little too Twilight for me, but let's not focus on that. She's a bondswoman, not afraid to use her feminin wiles to achieve her goal, and she's got this incredible gift of always knowing when she's being lied to. But she has major abandonment issues from growing up an orphan, and also has no friends. This is not a boring, one-dimensional hero. Yay!

Then we have her son, Henry (Jared Gilmore), who appears on her front door on her 28th birthday, just as she blows out a birthday candle wishing she did not have to spend the evening alone. I suppose every fairy tale needs a child's faith togive it full power, and he's a pretty good reason for Emma to go to Storybrook, Maine, where her future awaits.

So far so good...except as we are learning about the current state of affairs, we are also finding out how our fairy tale heroes got themselves stuck in our modern world. I can't say how I felt about Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas). I loved when Charming got their baby into the wardrobe to save her, fighting off enemy soldiers while wielding a sword in one hand and holding his child in the other. Also, having him get stabbed did really give a sense that the Happily Ever Afters were coming to an end. But I couldn't help but think a lot of it was a little cheesy.

Fairy tales can be cheesy. Enchanted certainly does a wonderful job of showing us the pitfalls of love at first sight, as well as the reasons why poofy dresses just aren't practical. The 10th Kingdom never shied away from story references and commentary. But in Once Upon a Time, they lacked a classy modern gloss across the fairy tale world, and yet never acknowledged the silly romanticism of Snow White's rediculous dresses or The Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla)'s Force-like powers.

The fairy tale world looked like something out of a 50s tv show. Too bad it's not the 50s anymore, and without winking at the audience about the choice, it just seemed as though it had not been carefully thought through.

But, we aren't going to hang around in that cheesy world too much. Instead, Emma's got to help people in the here and now.

So the big question that remains is how is the Evil Queen winning? Sure she's mayor of the town, but she doesn't seem that happy. Does she remember where they all came from, or was she just as much a victim as the others? And why on earth did a woman like that decide adoption was a good idea?

I'll continue to tune in to find out.