TV: Once Upon a Time

I just watched the pilot episode of "Once Upon a Time" and it was excellent -- story, characters, and production values. I hope they can keep it up. (Sundays, ABC.)

The premise: Snow White and Prince Charming survived the poison-apple incident, but on their wedding day the evil queen shows up to deliver a curse: no more happy endings, except for her -- everybody else in the village will be sent to an awful place. Later a pregnant Snow and the prince consult Rumpelstiltskin, who tells them that their child will escape and return on its 28th birthday to rescue the denizens of Storybook Forest. As the curse arrives and people start dying, they stow the just-born child, Emma, in a magic cabinet that will supposedly protect her from the curse.

In Boston, a bounty-hunter named Emma celebrates her birthday alone when a 10-year-old kid shows up on her doorstep claiming to be her son. She takes him home -- to Storybook, Maine -- with the intention of dropping him off and going back home. The boy, Henry, has a book of fairy tales that he claims are true, and he insists that the people he knows are the characters. Everybody else thinks he's nuts.

(This is not the same premise as the comic book Fables, though from the advance publicity I had wondered.)