Casting a spell

I got so involved with “Once Upon a Time” that within a quarter hour of meeting these characters for the very first time I was pleading with the screen not to let the Horrible Thing happen to them that was about to.

Part of the reason fairytales speak to us as they do is because at some basic level we wish they were true.

We want the damsel in distress to be saved. We want the handsome prince to swoop in, save the day and protect us from evil. We want tragedy to be averted with a kiss, curses to be lifted, the happily ever after endings and, maybe most of all, for good to triumph over evil.

Because so often, so very often, in this world, in our day to day lives, these are not our experiences.

In the world before Storybrooke, the storyline of Snow White was playing out, complete with dwarves, when the evil queen crashed the wedding and cursed the happy couple. Their firstborn, a daughter named Emma, is transported to our reality through a charmed wardrobe, just as the queen’s curse comes to be.

The queen transports all the characters to our world -- that very Very Bad Thing I was already hoping against hope would not happen to them. Storybrooke, Maine, a place where time has frozen. No one remembers who they are in their fairytales. Everyone simply lives their boring, endless lives over and over again.

Except for one boy, a child adopted by the evil queen ­– now no longer queen but simply the forever mayor of Storybrooke.

But he wasn’t a complete stranger to Storybrooke. His mother was the child lost in the wardrobe. Emma, who gave him up for adoption some 10 years before.

Emma, the child foretold by the mad mystic Rumplestiltskin to break the curse.

Emma’s grown into a tough strong girl, a bounty hunter, in fact, when the boy, Henry Mills, tracks her down in our world and brings her back to his own. They’re able to just drive there, but you get the sense that there’s some reason she can find the town while others would probably overlook it. She has some connection to it, after all.

And she also has a confrontation with the mayor, the evil queen, who on some level is becoming aware of the curse she laid on everyone in Storybrooke, including herself.

She has, after all, retained her Magic Mirror.

The story unfolds beautifully. Sunday’s premiere was some of the most engaging storytelling I’ve experienced on television in a good long while. And along with NBC’s premiere of “Grimm” tomorrow night, it’s exciting that producers are taking a chance on shows that explore life outside a crime scene.

“Once Upon a Time” airs new episodes Sundays at 8/7c on ABC.