Review: 'Once Upon a Time,' a 'Lost' fairy tale

You, the viewer, are now in the real world with Henry (Jared Gilmore, "Mad Men"), a 10-year-old who knows the secret of the evil queen's curse. She banished all the great figures of the fairy-tale world to a town in Maine called Storybrooke, where they live as normal humans.

As the show begins, Henry has run away from Storybrooke, where he lives with his adoptive mother, the town mayor (also Parrilla) to search for his birth mother, Emma (Jennifer Morrison, "House"). Her secret, which only Henry knows, is that she is the child of Snow White and Prince Charming.

In fact, "Once Upon a Time" is cleanly told even as it toggles between real and fairy-tale worlds, where there are actual fairies, but it's also probably worth noting that this is the creation of two former "Lost" writers (Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz). Logic, in other words, is not necessarily a given.

What's best about "Time" is its ambition; it glows with a near-theatrical shine, challenging viewers to think about TV drama as something other than boilerplate. There's a softhearted romantic core as well, or, as Henry would have us believe, dreams really do come true.