LOST'S Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz talk new show ONCE UPON A TIME

Lost writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz were interviewed by Vulture recently. They shared some details about their new show, Once Upon A Time currently in development at ABC.

Kitsis and Horowitz wrote the scripts for some of Lost's best episodes. The story about "a young boy who lives in Storybrooke, Maine, where he's convinced things aren't what they seem, and we also get glimpses — through flashbacks? flash-sideways? — of a fairy tale land where familiar evil queens and dwarves with sharply drawn personalities are quite real."

Damon Lindelof is also involved in the project which is still early in its development.  

Here is what they had to say when asked what the show is about:

Kitsis: What we want to do is take a look at well-known characters and stories and kind of dig deeper than what you know, and say, "Here's what you didn't know." We want to try to bring [the characters] out as people instead of just metaphors to deal with our fears

Horowitz: For us, first and foremost, this is a character show. We want to take the iconography that we've always loved and find find a new way to look at what makes these fairy-tale characters tick.

Here is what they had to say about how the project was created:

Horowitz: It was eight years ago. We had come off Felicity. And we got into a discussion about the kind of show we'd like to do, and why we write. We started talking about the myths and fairy tales that had inspired us, which led to, "How do you explore that in a new way?" We had no interest in retelling every story everyone knows.

Kitsis: And we started to say things like, "What if you were the evil queen? How annoying would it be to live in the enchanted forest ... [and] you have no hope of a happy ending?" It was that kind of weird take on it. We were younger writers, so people weren't in such a hurry to buy a crazy idea from two guys who were very young in their career. But the idea stuck with us.

Horowitz: The six years of Lost were rather intense and didn't really afford us the opportunity to develop it.

Kitsis: Then when Lost ended, ABC came to us and asked if we wanted to do our own show. We said we'd like to do this. They immediately said, "Great." And the very first thing we did was go to Damon and said, "Here's this crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy idea. Is this a show?" He's really been a godfather to us in helping us shape this.

It's reported that the show will bounce back and forth between to worlds — Fairytale Land and Storybrooke. This will be done with the help of flashbacks, a technique made famous by Lost.Here is what they had to say:

Kitsis: After six years of Lost, the DNA of that show is in us. We just found it to be an effective way to tell this [story]. The Lost pilot was wide enough and included enough things so that when season five came, and we spent half of the year in 1973, nobody cried foul. It felt like it was already a part of the DNA. We want to go into battle with as many tools as we can so we can tell as many stories in as many ways as possible. 

Horowitz: This [technique] was the best way of telling the story in the pilot. If we're lucky enough to move forward, we'd love to explore many different ways to tell stories.

I loved watching Lost because it was an event each week. Here is what they had to say when asked if the new show is one that must be watch religously each week:

Kitsis: There will be self-contained stories in each episode. [And] there will be a larger mythology at work. But it's not like if you miss an episode one week, you can't catch up.

Here is what they had to say about the character development and avoiding the cheese factor:

Horowitz: It really comes down to grounding it in real characters. If what the characters are doing is real, you have license to be as funny as you want to be. On Lost, Hurley was very funny, but he never told jokes. He never had pratfalls. 
Kitsis: The two favorite episodes of Lost that Adam and I wrote were "Dave," which was where Hurley has an imaginary friend, and "Trisha Tanaka is Dead," where Hurley finds a van and starts it. That feeling you got when the Three Dog Night song plays, and Hurley gets the van started — that's what we wanted this to be. It's funny like that. We don't want it to be "Wink, wink, aren't we clever." We want it to feel real and emotional. We want people to be swept up in the story and stop saying, "Hey, there's Pinnochio!" and instead say, "Oh, there's a child with a problem."

We can expect some cool twisted stuff from the show:

Kitsis: We're not doing the 12-year-old kid version of this. We're gonna tell stories that are dark and complex and emotional. They're not going to be lowered for younger people. Because at the end of the day, we want to do something that doesn't suck.
Horowitz: Not sucking is very, very important.

For the full interview, check out Vulture at the link below. I hope that this show gets picked up and can't wait to learn more about it. What are your thoughts?