Watching it felt like I was being unfaithful.

But now that I’ve got Bill Willingham’s approval, I can admit it’s a pretty good series. And it’s really not all that much like Fables.

They both start with a bunch of disparate fairy tale characters living together in the same town in the modern world. After that, though, Once Upon a Time feels like it owes less to Fables than it does to Lost.

That’s fair enough, since all the marketing material reminds us that two of Lost‘s executive producers are behind the show. So you can excuse all the appearances of Apollo bars, and the fact that the entire format of the series is taken directly from Lost: TV-pretty people trapped in a secluded location trying to figure out a series-long conundrum; each episode featuring two parallel stories in two different timelines, with each timeline giving context to the other.

And that’s okay, because that format is just as clever and flexible now as it was during the Dharma Initiative days. Even better, it actually makes sense here. In Lost, the flashbacks were used to stretch out the intrigue: we’d learn details about the characters based on past events. In Once Upon a Time, the situation is flipped: we in the audience know more about the characters’ stories than the characters themselves do. The premise is that they’ve all been placed under a curse that’s made them forget they’re storybook characters, to guarantee that none of them will have a happy ending.

That’s the most intriguing part to me, because it means that we have a better chance of getting a happy ending from Once Upon a Time than Lost was ever able to deliver. Everything in Lost depended on stretching the mystery out for as long as possible. Fables is in the same position, more or less: it’s an indefinitely ongoing story that has to keep building on itself. But with Once Upon a Time, we already know how the story’s going to end: they’re going to live happily ever after. The intrigue comes from the telling, and the re-telling.

Are Mary Margaret/Snow White and David/Prince Charming going to get together? Of course. Who are the bad guys? The Evil Queen and Rumplestiltskin. How did they all end up trapped here? It was a curse from the Evil Queen. We know what’s going to happen, the appeal of the stories is seeing how they happen. No “Are they in Purgatory?” style blue-balling here.

Of course, they get to take advantage of their series-long intrigue as well. It’s all in the details, filling in the stuff that wasn’t covered in the original stories. What exactly was it about Snow White that made the Evil Queen so angry? Plus there’s all the secret origin stories — they’ve already done Prince Charming, Jiminy Cricket, Rumplestiltskin and the Huntsman, and made them more interesting than I would’ve thought possible.

And for those of us who watched Lost looking for occurrences of the numbers, the Dharma logo, cross-overs of familiar characters, and implausible coincidences, there’s plenty of material here. Familiar and not-so-familiar characters pop up, and we can speculate on who they are and how their stories intersect. In this week’s episode, we saw how Snow White first met the dwarves. Before the Christmas break, the sheriff that everyone assumed to be the Big Bad Wolf turned out to be a different character.

On top of that, there’s the recurring appeal of Fables, which is seeing how fairy tale characters get translated to the modern day. And they’re usually clever and subtle. A bearded pharmacy owner reveals his fairy tale identity as soon as he sneezes. Red Riding Hood works for her grandmother and delivers food. A cleaning woman named Ashley turns out to be Cinderella. (That one was my favorite). I’m still hoping that they do an episode with a young blonde girl breaking into the home of three big, hairy gay men.

Another thing that I really like about the series is that it’s completely driven by female characters. The two heroes and the main villain are all women. And it’s done seamlessly, by virtue of the source material. Most of the fairy tales focused on female main characters, and yet still managed to make them all passive. When you update those characters to the modern day — or when you retell the original stories with a modern sensibility — you end up with stories centered on strong, intelligent, and independent women.

The casting (and stunt casting) helps, too. Jennifer Morrison is cool as hell and had me hoping for an entire season that she’d be Ted Mosby’s kids’ mother. It’s nice to see Ginnifer Goodwin not in insipid romantic comedies that try to pretend she’s not astoundingly beautiful. I have to admit to having a voice-crush on Raphael Sbarge since he played a Han Solo rip-off character in Knights of the Old Republic. Lana Parrilla has one note she has to keep hitting over and over again, and she’s still managing to change it up slightly between episodes (but they really need to give her something more to work with instead of just saying “You’re not welcome here, Miss Swan” repeatedly). And Robert Carlyle does fey, creepy, and menacing better than most.

Plus they’ve done plenty of guest appearances from actors from just about every nerd fantasy series I like: Pam from True Blood as Maleficient. Krycek from The X-Files as Hansel & Gretel’s dad. Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Hansel & Gretel’s witch. Charles Widmore from Lost as Prince Charming’s father.

I don’t think Once Upon a Time is as ground-breaking a series as Lost was. I can’t see it ever doing anything as stunning as the season two reveal of what was inside the Hatch. It’s not quite as hip or self-aware. (Which is partly a good thing, since going too self-aware with fairy tale stories would be insufferable; remaining a little bit square is exactly the right tone to hit). It relies a little too much on green screens and CGI (although it makes up for it with great costumes). And I do have to wonder how they’re going to get a series’ worth of material out of the premise.

It didn’t grab me instantly, like the Lost pilot did. But it’s had a great slow build-up so far, plenty of clever moments, great pacing, and just enough intrigue to carry it through the first season finale. And it’s really nice to see a series that doesn’t rely on dragging out mysteries, but recognizes the value of a familiar story told well.

It also borrows the concurrent-timelines gimmick from Lost and the police procedural plot-of-the-week/series-long conspiracy combo from The X-Files and virtually every TV series after The X-Files. It almost seems as if Fox wanted its own version of Lost but forgot that it’s already got its own version of Lost and it’s called Fringe.

Based on the pilot and first episode, though, it seems to be doing everything it can to discourage interest. Part of it’s built into the premise — right before Alcatraz shut down, hundreds of prisoners and guards just went missing. They’re showing up in the present day, un-aged and on the loose, still looking to pay back whatever was bugging them enough to get sent to a maximum security prison in the 60s. And, apparently, they may or may not have been given subliminal/post-hypnotic suggestions to kill folks on behalf of some yet-to-be-revealed shadow organization.

The problem is that murderers coming back from the past just isn’t all that compelling. They kind of used up every possible twist on that in the first two episodes, and there’s still an entire series and hundreds of bad guys left to bring back, over and over again. If all the episodes were done from the criminal’s perspective, as the first part of the pilot was structured, there might be some interesting future-shock material. But they got rid of that as quickly as possible, to focus on a police detective and Jorge Garcia playing basically Smart Hurley.

(Jorge Garcia is one of the best aspects of the show, incidentally, which is kind of a problem, since he’s a character actor who works best when he’s making observations from the sidelines).

As it is, you’ve got the super-secret high tech agency led by Sam Neill plus a cop using 2012 technology and an author who knows every detail about the prison and its residents, against… a bunch of guys from the 60s. Even murderers from the 60s seem relatively quaint compared to the post-Hannibal Lecter serial killers on every other crime show. I foresee lots of ominous scenes of the killer slowly approaching his victim, and then freaking out at the sound of a cell phone ringtone or the sight of an HDTV. “Now I’m going to gut you to appease my dark master and… my God! The screen is so thin! What sorcery is this, a portrait of the cast of Glee and yet it moves?!”

And let me get back to “super-secret high tech agency led by Sam Neill.” For some reason, I’ve had the idea stuck in my head for years that Neill lends an aura of integrity to whatever project he’s working on. But thinking back on everything I’ve seen him in, I have no idea where I got that idea. (Maybe The Hunt for Red October?) The man agreed to do everything asked of him in Event Horizon, for Pete’s sake. If that’s not reason enough to question his judgement, then his performance in Alcatraz might be. I’m sure it doesn’t help that he doesn’t have a lot to work with; his lines all seem to be taken directly from the master handbook of “Things Ball-Busting Heads of Secret Conspiracies Say.” But his delivery seems tone-deaf throughout, as if he’s playing everything a little camp while everyone else is trying to be straightforward.

My biggest problem with the show, again at least from the first two episodes, is that it doesn’t seem very smart. To be clear, I don’t mean real-world smart, but TV smart. Lost was, we all have to admit, a soap opera with pretty people in pretty scenery and lots and lots of crap science and implausible plot twists. And Alias was even goofier. But they both had a kind of swagger to them. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they were fully aware of how silly their core premise was, but they presented everything with the confidence of being in on the joke. They knew when to just drop something matter-of-factly, and when they were getting into weirder territory, and make it all sound like they knew exactly what they were doing.

Alcatraz takes an already somewhat dull premise and tries to milk intrigue out of it. How are these people coming back looking exactly the same as they did 50 years ago?! Well, time travel or some kind of stasis, obviously. And what does it have to do with this mysterious medical experiment?! It could be any one of a hundred different medical experiments we’ve seen on TV before, from cloning to alien-human hybrids to just run-of-the-mill tachyon injections. Showing a doctor taking a few vials of blood from a guy does nothing to pique my interest. Making an incision and it shoots out a jet of toxic gas which incapacitates an ambulance and gives everyone black ink running out of their eyes: that’s got my attention.

It’s disappointing, because I was kind of looking forward to getting wrapped up in and ultimately disappointed by another big-mystery series. But this one just strikes me as another show like the Sci Fi channel’s Haven: the main cast is competent but not charming enough to keep me coming back, the premise is inherently repetitive, and the events aren’t weird enough (in TV terms) to make for must-watch television.

This post is bitching about the first 10 or 15 minutes that I saw. The premise of the show is basically X-Men done as a police procedural: a team of people with “special abilities” get together and solve crimes with David Strathairn as a hairier Professor Xavier. Fair enough.

At the beginning of the episode, we get an introductory scene for each of mutants alphas heading towards this week’s big case. Each scene explains exactly what each character’s power is: the woman with super-persuasion powers talks her way out of a traffic ticket, the man with super-strength pushes an SUV out of the way, the girl with super-senses overhears a whispered conversation out of a sea of noise, and the over-protected autistic kid who can sense TV and radio transmissions watches TV signals no one can watch while his mom tries to talk to him.

After each one, there’s a zoom in on the agent’s personnel file that lists his or her name and power. It’s completely, insultingly superfluous.

Due to my super-human ability to perceive what I’m being shown in a television program, I’d already figured out each character’s name and super-power from the scene showing their name and super-power. But somebody on the production decided to completely underestimate the audience’s intelligence and insist on treating us like easily confused simpletons. Whether it was an executive somewhere, or one of the show creators pre-censoring himself, I don’t know. Either way, it’s infuriating.

Each one is around 10 seconds long, so in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal. What makes it so obnoxious is that it was so unnecessary — the set-up scenes were so well done, comparatively. They conveyed every single thing they needed to. It just reeks of that “what if people don’t get it?” attitude.

The show itself is fine, from what I’ve seen; the Onion review’s description of a less pretentious Heroes is pretty on target. It’s a lot like what you’d expect a USA Network show about people with super powers to be. And I just don’t think people on the USA Network have any business assuming they’re smarter than the people watching.

Nobody does, actually, but those guys in particular.

The New Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated series
Except for maybe “The Powerpuff Girls,” any animated series aimed at kids has failed the second they make it smart enough for adults to like, too. I really like that the new series is for fans of the old series — they’ve got all kinds of callbacks to the original monsters, cameos from “New Scooby Doo Mysteries” celebrities like Don Knotts, and clever bits like casting Casey Kasem as Shaggy’s dad. And they have a season-wide story arc hinting at the original bunch of crime-solving teens in the same city, with their talking parrot. I hope it lasts.

Aquaman on the new “Brave and the Bold” series
The series isn’t quite as charming as it used to be, but Aquaman (voiced by John DiMaggio, who does Bender from Futurama and Jake from Adventure Time) is still the best character. Nice to see the guy finally getting a little respect, since he’s had a hard few decades.

Man vs Food
Everything about this show is just wrong. It’s a testament to gross American excess and waste, the host is plenty likeable but he talks through his nose, and they referred to Walnut Creek as “just outside of San Francisco.” But still, if it comes on, my ass is fixed to the couch and my eyes to the TV for hours, or until creepy Anthony Bourdain comes on, whichever comes first. I’m not proud of it, but it happens.

The Daily Puppy
is my favorite blog, hands down. Don’t tell my cat.

The “Walt Disney World Ephemera” group on Flickr
and the “Disney Printed Matter” group
There are billions and billions of groups for Disney fans on Flickr, but these two are specifically for maps, magazine ads, FastPasses, ride tickets, parking tickets, and old shopping bags. When I was younger, I used to sneak into my brother’s room and rummage through the bottom drawer of his dresser, because that’s where he kept the bags full of souvenirs from our previous trip to Disney World. (Other families hid porn, my family hid Disney souvenirs). To this day, the EPCOT Future World icons and original Walt Disney World logo and even this photo still trigger a glee response at the base of my spine. Also this.

More evidence that no matter what you’re into, there are at least fifty other people somewhere on the internet who are even more into it than you are. And yes, I mean the naughty stuff too.

And unrelated, but just because I love it a lot: “Whiners Can Be Losers” from the Cartoon Network’s golden days.

Turns out that some of the rarer episodes are out there on something that’s like YouTube but isn’t but is also owned by Google and like YouTube, it also shows videos. You can search for “Time of the Apes,” which is one I haven’t seen for over a decade and will likely never be released in one of the official sets because of rights issues. Other semi-rare classics to search for: “Daddy-O,” “Master Ninja I,” and “Fugitive Alien.”

I’m excited because I love MST3k and hate copyright.

Season one took a while to get up to speed — it wasn’t exactly clear whether or not they were actually in on the joke. Season two had some amazing moments, but you had to slog through lots of pointless subplots and tedious month-long orgies to get to them. But season three has been firing on all cylinders. It’s got the big mystery (what is Sookie Stackhouse?), a fantastic villain, a ton of interesting side characters, and finally, they’ve completely embraced being on HBO.

Before, it’s always felt like they’re kind of holding back or saving themselves for big moments. This season, the HBO-ness never quite stops. I think every episode has had the Nudity Violence Adult Language warning, but this year they really hit their stride at combining all of those at the same time. This episode started with a blood-covered shower sex scene that would’ve been the climax of any other HBO series, but that was tame compared to everything else and in retrospect actually kind of sweet, in True Blood terms. (Incidentally, with as much fluid exchange as goes on in this series, I’ve got to wonder why they haven’t spent more time talking about STDs). You’d think that you can only go over the top once or twice, but now they just keep stacking more top. And going from really, genuinely dark, to laugh-out-loud funny over the course of one scene.

The end of the most recent episode (“Everything is Broken”) sums up everything that’s great about this season — a creepy-sexy scene in a limo followed immediately by a tour de force performance that’s both hilarious and horrifying. And I never say “tour de force” so you know he knocked it out of the park. And they didn’t even need to ramp it up that much, considering they already had the scene with him narrating his evil plan of revenge to a crystal goblet filled with vampire remains.

I’m not saying it’s all been great. I like the subplots with Sam and Jason in theory — if you spent too much time focused on vampire royalty and Nazi werewolves, it could get too fruity. Even if the werewolves are mostly biker trash. True Blood does need to have a steady supply of straight-up white trash. And this season’s definitely delivered, but there’s the problem: even if your dog fighting rednecks are shapeshifters and your meth dealers are some yet-to-be-determined supernaturals (probably shapeshifters), it’s still hard for that to compete with vampire royalty and Nazi werewolves. You can’t really bash a guy’s head in with a mace and then cut to the dog fight and expect it to be horrific. I’m a little curious to see what the meth dealers turn out to be, but I’ll definitely be happy when Sam’s brother and the rest of his family go the way of Eggs.

I already said that Denis O’Hare is amazing as Russell Edgington, and I also want to go on record as saying I’m on Team Alcide all the way. And Alfre Woodard is pretty fantastic with just a few lines here and there as Lafayette’s mostly-crazy mother, but she’s Alfre Woodard so that’s more or less to be expected.

But the actor who doesn’t get nearly enough credit is Carrie Preston as Arlene. It’s kind of a thankless part, but I think the show would be a lot worse without her stabilizing everything. She’s not the only actress on the show who’s much better-looking in real life (Rutina Wesley really needs a scene where she’s not tied up or crying) but she is the only one who’s really having to walk the line between comic relief and drama. In less competent hands, she could’ve ended up just a caricature. But she manages to make an over-dramatic and a little racist stereotypical character and make her really sympathetic. On a show like True Blood, that can go from sad to horrifying to hilarious at a moment’s notice, you need somebody who gets it.

So that’s all I’ve got about True Blood, and it only took up a little less than an hour. I’ve still got to wait a week until the next episode.

You are the very first person ever to get the meaning of the show. Yes. It is a love story. Always has been…always will be.

Yeah.

I’m all for artists coming up with a different interpretation of their work than may be obvious to the fans. I’m even all for the more cynical version, artists putting a spin on their work for the press. But I’ve gotta call BS on that one. The show about survivors of a plane crash on a tropical island haunted by a smoke monster has not always been a love story.

If the guy who made the show doesn’t know what it’s about, I guess you can’t expect anybody else to, either. “Everybody Loves Hugo” just felt like a writer’s meeting where everybody said “oh crap we’ve only got five episodes left?!”

Spoilers for this week’s episode “Everybody Loves Hugo…”

I’ve got no idea what that whole business with Gaia was supposed to be about. (That’s her name on Rome, anyway, I can’t remember her name on Lost). For starters, any time they pick the Black Rock dynamite, you know what’s coming, and I mean come on, guys: you’ve already done that one. They’ve spent all this time developing the character, only to have her accomplish nothing and go out like a chump. That’s not a shocking twist; it’s a waste. Especially when they had her complaining about how she had no purpose now that Jacob was dead. You can’t try to build up sympathy for a character and then just kill her off.

I was all excited at the potential that Libby was going to be coming back, but that was back when I thought they were going to do something with her. Who was her husband? What was the boat race for? Why was she in a mental institution? Again, it was build-up with no pay-off; instead they spent all this time following an imaginary story they just made up.

When they showed Sun writing a note to Jeff Fahey’s character, I realized I’d totally forgotten the whole bit about her sudden treebonk-induced aphasia. The reason I forgot about that: it’s yet another new little plot thing they’re introducing without any context, instead of tying up loose ends.

I guess that may not be fair; they did explain the whispers in the jungle with grace and subtlety. “OH HEY NEVER MIND I think I know what these whispers are after all. They’re dead people right, Michael?” “Yes. See ya.”

And also the smoke monster knocked Desmond down a well for no reason.

Now I’m on the edge of my seat wondering what are going to be the implications of alternate-reality Desmond running over Locke with his car, because they’ve spent a lot of time and energy setting that whole idea.

I already explained why I like “Castle” so much, and if you’ve been unfortunate enough to follow me on the Twitters, you’ve seen that turn into a full-blown new-favorite-TV-show infatuation. And there’s one bit from the first part of the recent “Major TV Event” that sums up everything I like about the series:

A serial killer is at work in New York, obsessed with Detective Beckett’s “alter-ego” Nikki Heat, calling her and taunting her to catch him before he kills again. The FBI arrives on the crime scene, with a tough expert profiler (played by Dana Delaney) claiming jurisdiction over the case and being dismissive of Castle and Beckett’s casework. She brings a ton of high-tech equipment and a cadre of FBI agents into the precinct and takes over the situation room…

…and then, they all cooperate and work together to try and solve the case. Everybody is friendly and supportive of each other. On a crime show! All it takes is one commercial break before they’re all making wisecracks at each other and gossiping.

Which proves that there’s no cliche they can’t deflate. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been getting older or what, but over the past few years, I’ve developed a lot more respect for creators who aren’t just obsessed with novelty, but can spin and rework formulas and genre tropes into something new. And this is exactly how you do genre fiction: be confident enough to acknowledge cliches and recognize why they’re useful, and then use them as tools instead of just crutches.

Take for instance the “Bones”- and “CSI”-like super-futuristic VR holo-screens they toted in for this episode, causing me to emit a pained groan. They brought them in, set them up, had Castle make a joke about them to make it clear they weren’t taking this stuff too seriously, and then took advantage of exactly what they’re good for: cramming a ton of pseudo-detective work into a limited amount of screen time. Basing a code on Castle’s books is a neat idea; having to crack the code could’ve been clumsy and tedious without an injection of TV-universe technology.

Another great touch was having Susan Sullivan reminiscing with an old episode of “The Incredible Hulk” she’d appeared in. It’s tough to hit just the right level of “meta” enough to acknowledge you’re in on the joke, but not so much that it makes the whole thing pointless (e.g. the Firefly reference earlier in the season that didn’t quite work as well).

The beauty of it is that if you’d described just the plot of this episode to me, I would’ve dismissed it as just another police procedural, and probably a hopelessly cliched one at that. But the plot is usually secondary on this show — why else would they put a “surprise” exploding apartment cliffhanger in an episode titled “Tick tick tick…” — because everything is driven by chemistry.

(And Beckett was totally in a different apartment, of course. That’s the one TV gimmick that’s been enabled by cell phones, instead of being ruined by them.)

I’ve mentioned the “Clone Wars” series on here before, but it’s always along the lines of “No really, it’s better than you’d think.” It’s been pushing my buttons, but you know it’s still a cartoon TV series aimed directly at kids.

This week’s episode was called “The Manadlorian Plot” and had Obi-Wan Kenobi going to the planet Mandalore (Boba Fett’s home world!) and engaging in some The Thin Man-style banter with a duchess there before uncovering a terrorism plot staged by a suicide bomber, after which they flew to the planet’s moon and took speeder bikes to visit a long-abandoned mining station that was taken over by a renegade guerilla force of Boba Fetts plotting to bring down the government on account of its neutral stance in the war. After a series of near-miss escapes and explosions, Obi-Wan gets in a lightsaber duel with the head of the rebel group, who’s using a black, katana-style lightsaber that he got as a spoil of war from a raid on an ancient Jedi temple.

That sound you hear is 12-year-old me having an aneurism.

I’m not sure anymore that this series is aimed at kids; I suspect it’s aimed directly at teens and pre-teens in 1983, and it’s just taken them 27 years to broadcast it.

And really, it kind of is. The cases are fairly predictable, the references all a little dated, the situations all a little bit cliched and predictable. But there’s a big difference, and surprisingly, it’s not just whether or not you like Nathan Fillion. (That’s only about 85% of the draw).

The difference is that there’s a genuine chemistry between the characters. And not just the two leads (although they’re the most obvious), but everybody in the cast. It really does seem like it’d be a fun show to work on. Even when the story seems to be coasting, it’s just pleasant to coast along with them.

And even more appealing to me: everybody likes each other. I’ve been watching several episodes back-to-back, and it was starting to dawn on me that there was something odd about this series. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, until there was a scene where Castle went back to his apartment and… had a pleasant, clever conversation with his mother and his daughter. It’s the standard template for every single TV series that you can’t have drama without conflict, so you always get the tough-as-nails police chief reining in the lone wolf cop, or the detective with a dark past, or a tension-filled home life. “Castle” seems to get that when you’ve got a homicide every episode, the tension is already built in. You can have all the characters just being nice and supportive of each other, and as long as you’ve got the writing chops for it, it doesn’t have to be dull.

It sounds like I’m damning the series with faint praise, but I’m really not: that kind of believable chemistry not just between your will-they-or-won’t-they? leads, but between the entire cast, isn’t just something that happens. The whole show is just charming and occasionally goofy, without being completely unable to take itself seriously like “Psych,” and without being self-consciously quirky or wrapped up in false romantic tension like “Moonlighting.” I’d say it’s more like The Thin Man without the booze, instead of “Law & Order” with more jokes.

And the writing’s pretty sharp in places, too. My favorite bit from the most recent episode (spoiler if you haven’t seen it and are interested): there’s a tense as-close-as-this-series-gets-to-drama moment in which Beckett is being hit with feelings of self-doubt, and she’s worried about making a mistake on a very important and very personal case. To reassure her, Castle says, “Do you know why I chose you as my inspiration for Nikki Heat?” “No, why?” Pause. “Because you’re tall. Now get in there and do your job.”