I've been watching this since late last year via the medium of internet piracy because TV networks are tectonically slow and too retarded to recognise the internet as a ready built medium for transmitting media to the rest of the world but now it's coming to a Channel 5 near you on April 1st.
Seriously, put stuff on the internet for me and I will give you all my money but in the mean time I'm just spending it on booze, smokes and jaffa cakes.
The show is kinda like the comic Fables, written by some of the people who worked on lost but don't let that put you off.
Fairy tail characters are real and in a badly thought out dickmove the Evil Queen decides to unleash a curse that will transport them all to someplace horrible.
America.
Here they have no knowledge of their previous lives and carry on regardless while the Evil Queen, now the mayor, continues to dick them over.
It's a combination of small town dramas and flashbacks to their previous lives.
And Robert Carlyle is Rumplestiltskin and Giancarlo Esposito, who was Gus Fring in Breaking Bad, is the genie of the lamp.
Quote from: Durendal on 21 March, 2012, 04:55:09 PMThe show is kinda like the comic Fables
Interestingly the broadcaster had previously optioned Fables, let the option drop and then launched this. See also Grimm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fables_(comics)#Television_series
If I was DC/Warners I'd be talking to my lawyers about it because this pretty much torpedoes any chance of a Fables TV show.
I would normally jump at the chance to weigh into an argument about the lack of honesty and originality in tv production land and say this is clearly a Fables rip-off because the producers went out of their way to say it wasn't in the same way the producers of Heroes went out of their way to say that they had never read Watchmen despite one of them being a vocal critic of both Watchmen and Alan Moore, but there are a fuckton of precursors to the Fables premise on tv going back at least to the 1970s and stuff like Monster Squad (a live-action series where wolfman, Dracula and Frankenstein battled supervillains), and even as recently as The Gates, a tv show about a gated community populated by fairytale monsters in human form, itself pretty much a rip-off of Monster High, a range of kids' dolls modelled around the premise of famous monsters in high school.
So no points for originality, but equally I don't think they can be accused of ripping off one particular property - certainly not if the generic and derivative storytelling of the episodes that I watched are any indication.