Once Upon a Time (on ABC starting in 2011) is meatloaf for television: warm, comfortable, nourishing in an old-fashioned sort of way but (at least using this recipe) it lacks spice. And this is because of its theory of happiness.

About ten minutes in to the first episode, 10-year-old Henry announces he's bringing the woman who gave him up for adoption at birth to his small-town home to fight "the final battle," and at that point we know the ending: what begins with "once upon a time"- if it's produced by Disney – always ends with "happily ever after."

The first season has a dark sharpness to it, mirroring and building on the clever turns that the Grimms' fairy tales had – in which the good and the evil get punished alike. But this doesn't fit with the Disney vision in which good is always rewarded; this unpredictability gives way quickly to a simple morality based on individual behavior.

This isn't to say the rest of the series lacks redeeming qualities – I've watched all of it on Netflix, and I wouldn't have gotten through it if it didn't have something going for it, something good mixed in with the repetitive plots and characters that cycle back and forth between good and evil.

The town where the show is set – Storybrooke, Maine – is something of a Potemkin village filled with Potemkin people. Exhausted with good always winning out, the wicked queen who tormented Snow White has set a curse on all the people of the fairy tale realm. She is aware that "happily ever afters" – a rather clunky phrase that comes up from time to time in the show – are reserved for heroes and the good, while villains like herself are left out in the miserable cold. Attempting to break the rules and create her own happy ending, she has transports them to the upper North East, where winters are surprisingly short the fairy-tale denizens live in an amnesiac daze, imagining they are ordinary Americans, under her mayoralty.

This, of course, can't last.

The fact that these folks aren't really committed to their new lives means that no one ever develops a way of seeing that could come into conflict with anyone else's. The townsfolk all have jobs, but they rarely actually seem to do them. The nuns don't spread the Good Word. (In their previous lives they were all faeries, so I'm pretty sure they're pagans, anyway.) The mayor spends most of her time bossing people around, even when they don't work for her, never dealing with water and sewer issues. And the town pawn broker never actually sells anything. He just trades them for nefarious favors that make life difficult for his enemies rather than for the money one might think he would need to buy meals that the café proprietor never seems to cook.

This is probably for the best, from a narrative perspective. If the newspaper's editor were digging into Storybrooke's issues he might find that people with different motivations pursue agendas that create interesting conflicts with one another. And that would cloud the story that lies beneath this cardboard town: the conflict between good and evil.

Once Upon a Time's Rules of Reality

One of the few people who actually do work is the town psychologist, human version of Jiminy Cricket. An odd choice for a therapist, since in Pinocchio he's basically a living superego – Freud's source of guilt, and lots of the problems the first psychotherapists sought to help people overcome. He seems to practice a strangely menacing form of psychotherapy. "What did I tell you about lying?" Dr. Hopper tells Henry. "Giving in to one's dark side never accomplishes anything." Repressing your questionable impulses rather than understanding them – quite an odd lecture for a psychotherapist to give.

An odd lecture in our world, at least. But it fits in squarely with the rules of Once Upon a Time. If the job of the psychologist is to help people be happy then the best way to do it in Storybrooke is not to understand one's dark side, but to defeat it. Goodness, as this Disneyfied Freud might say, is the royal road to happiness. The fact that all the characters are serving universal moral masters – either hope and kindness, or revenge and resentment – means that they end up less-well-drawn than their potential during the more ambiguous first season might suggest. And the triumph of good over evil is never questioned. So you know what you're getting from the start.

Enlightenment-Era Fairy Tales

These are not the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales. Disney may have borrowed the frames of the stories from Europe, but it built an older, and deeply American interpretation, onto them.

It would be unfair to expect a program based on Disney's movie-version fairly tales to provide a jolt of realism. Instead, Once Upon a Time follows a very specific, well-defined formula to deliver escape. What makes it both annoying and satisfying is the fact that good always wins out over evil, and that this always leads to happiness, at least until the next villain takes up residence in the neighborhood, which happens surprisingly often in Storybrooke. Although it may seem simplistic by today's standards, Once Upon a Time has developed an unusually sophisticated, elaborate version of a 17^th and 18^th century theory, a theory about morality being the source of happiness that was built into our national story-telling habits, and tailored it to a 21^st century aesthetic.

This theory of happiness developed during the Enlightenment, and it was baked in to American society from the start. The "pursuit of happiness" was only possible as a goal for the people of the United States if happiness meant the public good. In those days, it was thought, there really was one objective good, what God wanted for us and from us. God wanted us to be happy, which meant being comfortable and secure, and this involved cooperation and organization to conquer nature before winter, disease, and hunger conquered us. Working together did provide certain forms of happiness – physical comfort and the feelings that went along with it, and a sense of belonging.

But as time went on, our ancestors moved away from this vision of God's will. In the US, ideas about individualism rivaled, then replaced, community as the top value. Romantic poets and philosophers questioned the idea that morality was essential to human nature. And as technology and commerce allowed us to be comfortable more of the time, ideas about ethics being the source of comfort faded.

This story goes back before the Brothers Grimm published their collections of stories in 19^th century Europe. But this American story – that the good will be happy – is still with us. It has morphed over the centuries, but it still resonates. Disney has spent almost a century exploring and promoting it; it's part of the brand.

And Once Upon a Time takes us back to that familiar, comfortable old story.