It’s time for us to get all caught up with the news from Storybrooke – or more specifically out of Storybrooke. The town’s all a-buzz with news of a spinoff, that now has a title: Once: Wonderland. First, let me tell you what it is not. It is not yet a series. It has a name, it has writers, and casting has begun.
It is also just now being written, and all that’s being written is, according to Deadline, a 15-20 page, four scene presentation. That doesn’t mean it isn’t going to be on ABC‘s fall schedule, it just means that it might not be, so although you may want to reserve your blog names now, maybe save your money on the upgrades for a little bit.
It also means that any or all of the information below may well be changed entirely before the show is broadcast, if it indeed gets picked up. Keeping all of those caveats and disclaimers in mind…
Here’s who and what is in place so far. That four scene presentation is being written by Once Upon a Time‘s co-creators Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, with input from sci-fi writing stars Jane Espenson (Battlestar Galactica, Once Upon a Time) and Zack Estrin (The River, No Ordinary Family).
The current talk is that if the show is picked up to series, Estrin would be showrunner with Horowitz and Kitsis, who would also stay with the parent show, while Espenson would continue to work on the parent show but not the spinoff. Personally I’m hoping that she’ll write for both.
This is the show we reported to you back in February as potentially a spinoff for the Mad Hatter, with replacement casting since the current Mad Hatter on OUaT, Sebastian Stan, wouldn’t be available. Now that idea has apparently been dropped in favor of it being an Alice-centric series. Hopefully that means we’ll continue to see Sebastian Stan in periodic appearances on OUaT.
And although it had been previously thought that the setting would be Wonderland in a post-curse world, with potential flashbacks like those that occur in the parent series, it is now being reported as set in a pre-curse world.
The three main characters have been cast. They are Sophie Lowe (top photo) (original Australian version of The Slap, which I couldn’t stand but she was good in it) as the generous-hearted but scarred-from-a-hard-life Alice, Brit Peter Gadiot as her mysterious love interest Cyrus, and the very excellent Michael Socha (UK Being Human) as sardonic-adventurer man-of-action loner heart-breaker the Knave of Hearts.
That’s about it for now. Best of luck to everyone involved! We’ll keep you posted.
