Ginnifer Goodwin & Co vs. Grimm – Fall TV’s Best Fairy Tale Show?

Gotta say, right out of the gate, how psyched are we to have Kaley Cuoco HOSTING the 2012 People’s Choice Awards?! She’s amazing and unbelievably funny and January 11^th is going to be one fantastic showdown. (Don’t forget: November 8^th is next week – that’s when we’ll announce the official nominations that YOU voted in…so stay tuned.)

Meanwhile, Happy Halloween! Hope you and your kids/parents/siblings/posse have a great night.  As someone who supported herself one autumn playing the Witch of Scarewood Forest in NYC’s Madison Scare Garden Halloween Scream Park, I have a deep appreciation for this holiday. Along with a commitment to avoid large groups of drunken tourists on October the 31^st for the rest of my life. Not that it wasn’t fun – because it was, nor that I didn’t meet amazing people – because I did. Still, you do get a little jaded when you watch visitors taking drunken swings at the very same druids and the dwarves you’d split bagels with earlier. But the kids were awesome, and my job was to oversee the ones who got too scared (which meant pretty much every four-year-old who tried to take on the Riker’s Island Prison Maze came directly to me within minutes.)

Who saw scary movies/ TV this weekend? Antonio Banderas definitely made plenty of scratch at the box office with Puss in Boots (to the Halloween record-breaking tune of $34 million bucks). How about TV – it looks like the spate of cancellations might be done for a while. And even though Pan Am continues to limp along with sagging viewership, ABC doesn’t seem to want to pull the plug on it – yet. Oh I watch it still, although I think they need more international intrigue. In fact, that seems to be the problem with the show – they have such a cool time period, where so much was going on culturally and historically anyway, but they don’t really know where to focus their attention. It’s all over the map.

A scary (ish) show I really liked and thought I wouldn’t at all? Once Upon A Time. Now this is also from ABC, and much like the Playboy Club/Pan Am period piece rivalry, this too has a network twin of sorts – Grimm, which I haven’t seen. Evidently that show is far darker because it involves monsters and nasty crimes that its lead must uncover. (Of course, Grimm’s fairy tales in general were not known to be light-hearted romps, many of them were quite violent and actually, politically subversive). So Grimm is definitely not for me, but the first two episodes of Once Upon a Time made for some genuinely entertaining TV. Basic idea is this: there are two parallel worlds in the show, one contemporary and one a fairy tale community. In the current setup everyone lives in a village that’s intelligence-insultingly named Storybrooke. The other half of the show’s in an enchanted forest where there are all manner of fairy tale characters mixed up together. (This will be smart for casting later). The story revolves around a child, who knows that each character in the town is correspondingly a fairy tale character in that parallel world – only nobody believes him. He sets out to find his biological mother because his adoptive mother – the town mayor – also happens to be a nasty, witchy piece of work – see where I’m going with this? My point is that what looked silly is a bit, but in the grand tradition of shows like Buffy, a little suspension of disbelief may be all you need. Nor does it hurt that the cast is good – Jared Gilmore is terrific as the kid. He’s also spent a fair amount of time around other good actors – he’s Bobby Draper on Mad Men. Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Carlyle and Lana Parrilla are terrific baddies, and Jennifer Morrison is the requisite hot blonde. I think this show has something and plan to tune in more. How about you – will you watch Once Upon a Time? 

Today’s poll:

Kaley Cuoco will host the 2012 People’s Choice Awards. Besides the smash Big Bang Theory, which of Kaley’s other roles is your favorite?

1)   Charmed

2)   8 Simple Rules

3)   Growing Up Brady

4)   Killer Movie