10 Essential Feminist TV Shows To Watch This Fall

Once Upon A Time, Promotional Image, Credit: ABC

Once Upon A Time – ABC – September 25

If dramatic realism or goofy comedy isn’t your style, might we suggest the very theatrical and slightly campy fun of ABC’s Once Upon A Time?

Once Upon A Time is a magical dramatic television show about the fairytale world. Now beginning its sixth season, the show revolves around Storybrooke, a town in which all fairytale characters live. Over its many seasons, it has incorporated almost every fairytale imaginable, including The Wizard of Oz, Frozen, Peter Pan, and even some that don’t quite qualify as fairytales (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Camelot, etc.).

Once Upon A Time functions like an enchanted soap opera, reveling in its ability to ignore the normal rules of realistic storytelling and create extreme circumstances based in magic. But the show doesn’t stick to standard damsel stereotypes when it comes to its women. Almost every female character is presented in empowering and empathetic ways. Once Upon A Time even features queer women; Mulan falls in love with Sleeping Beauty, and last season included a true love’s kiss between Ruby (Little Red Riding Hood) and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.

Hopefully further progressive representation of women awaits us in Season 6 of Once Upon A Time, premiering on ABC on September 25.