There are shows that are good, there are shows that are bad, there are shows that are your favorites, and then there are shows that can’t help but be formative.

Once Upon a Time is one of the latter.

As much as I like to pretend I didn’t dedicate an insane amount of mental energy to this show and all its various and numerous problems. I did. So… let’s try and parse something out.

The Pitch: A bail bonds woman seemingly from our world gets wrapped up in fairytale quests after having it revealed to her that the beliefs she’s held about her birth is a lie. 

Now, you might be thinking “That’s a terrible summary” and yeah! It is! But it’s also the best you’re gonna get due to how this show is structured. For the first… two seasons it was a “run of the mill” family drama where Twist! Everyone involved is a fairytale character taking influence from their Disney interpretations (which made sense, the show was produced by ABC who has Disney as their parent company) or other public domain characters. By season three, we’ve introduced the split season, usually notated by 3A and 3B and so on. The plots and storylines famously only get wilder from there.

If you know anything about Once Upon a Time and you haven’t seen a single episode, you’ve probably heard about the insanity of some of the later seasons: Little Bo Peep the mob boss! The Literal God Hades falling in love with the Wicked Witch of the West! The fact that practically everyone is related to one another! The god damn musical episode!

Before I get too into critiques, I should express that there are elements of this show that I do enjoy, I would not have dedicated this much brain space to something I hated entirely. The casting director deserves an Emmy for pretty much everyone in the cast (especially the blatantly corporately mandated Frozen arc), the costuming is incredible in both the Fairytale Land and the modern day, and occasionally there are some truly iconic funny lines that are intentionally funny. (The line: “It’s a good thing we don’t have Thanksgiving in our land, because that dinner would suck.” Lives in my brain rent free and is typically my personal summary of what the hell this show was about)

But the actual best way I can sum up my feelings about Once Upon a Time is a lament to lost potential. Potential seems to pop up a lot whenever I talk about this show with friends. “This character had so much potential”, “that subplot had potential”, “this show had potential”, you get the idea. Potential is a weirder thing to mourn than a good thing gone sour. 

When a good thing goes sour there are probably hundreds of little moments that spell the downfall, or maybe there’s just one big shake up the show can’t grow past or around or over (but that’s another essay). Potential is the sort of thing where at thirteen you’re teaching yourself to script doctor with friends because you’re so annoyed with where the writers went that your film brain in the making can’t help but try and fix it. How to actually grow and develop the characters when the writers have either forgotten them or chosen to let them stagnate for reasons beyond your comprehension.

Or maybe that was just me and I should’ve seen the film degree coming.

Granted, you and your thought experiments don’t have to worry about budgets or actor schedules, so you can make that character who was a fun idea in season one come back and join more shenanigans even when his actor has gone onto bigger things. Or scheduling conflicts because your show is one of twelve filming in that particular corner of Vancouver so while sharing casts is easy it doesn’t make it any less inconvenient. Or again, just mild convincement that the writers forgot about the character in question. (All things that more or less happened.)

Tumblr user ghostzvne created a tumblr post where they posited the idea of “they forgot to put the good in it”, the idea that something has so much potential in it but it falls flat because they forgot to put the good in it, and that is how I feel about certain aspects of Once. The aspects that still have me gnashing my teeth 12 years later and yet there is just enough there that I occasionally get it into my head that hey, maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remember it being and I should try giving it a rewatch. I end up disappointed about the same place every time, but the fact that I keep going back is something worthy of admiration.

Still, you can learn, some would argue more, from a property with glaring flaws than one perceived as pretty perfect by first glance. Would I have the friends, tastes in media, or complex feelings about Robin Hood mythos without Once Upon a Time?

Maybe, maybe not.

All I know is I wouldn’t have let Regina backslide into all her bad habits and Robin Hood would’ve been more than a sexy lamp if I’d been in the writing room.