Architects Of Wonderland: Adam Horowitz & Edward Kitsis On The OUAT Spin-Off

As mentioned in previous posts, Once Upon A Time In Wonderland is coming to Thursday nights on ABC this Fall, and at this year’s TCA press tour, we spoke with the show’s Executive Producers, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, for more scoop on what we can expect between the new series and its parent show.

The first thing we had to ask, of course, concerned the show’s many visual effects. The presentation pilot, which has been screened for critics, has a very cinematic feel. Will they be able to keep that up on a weekly basis? Adam Horowitz confirms that such feats can be done, and they have been done already with the presentation pilot, which was done on half of a usual episode’s budget. “It wasn’t like an inflated, crazy pilot budget at all,” Adam explains, “and that’s something we’re super proud of, because we also knew going into this, that if we’re going to go into this world and we’re going to do these kind of insane effects, and put our characters in these crazy situations, we have to be able to, week after week, achieve that. We can’t just have the first week be crazy, and then every week they’re standing next to a tree,” he jokes.

Edward Kitsis adds that after doing 44 episodes of Once Upon A Time, many lessons — including what looks better at what times, and what can and can’t be done — have been learned, and those lessons were taken to heart when writing the pilot. The questions of maintaining the quality were also brought up by the network, and he assures that they can do it. “If you can’t, then it’s like you’re the Expensive Pilot Cheap Show, and we never want to be that,” he says.

Adam and Edward both describe OUAT in Wonderland star Sophie Lowe “as a very special talent” who brought “something you can’t describe” to her audition tape. They also confirmed that we will see familiar faces from the parent series within Wonderland’s first 13 episodes.

“Yes, you will [see them],” Horowitz says. “But, with the caveat being that if you haven’t watched the mothership, you will be able to jump right in and watch the show and follow the show. And if you do watch it, you will hopefully be very much rewarded.”

“There will never be a situation where Snow White comes in, and you’re just expected to have been caught up because you watched Once,” Kitsis adds. “I think the thing that we loved about this show is that Wonderland has its own mythology, and its own characters, so that you can watch it without ever seeing Once Upon A Time, but of course, we’re fanboys, so we’ve got things to reward the Once viewer.” As a matter of fact, there is a segment in the presentation pilot that includes a tie in to and footage from a past Once Upon A Time episode involving characters in Storybrooke, though that will change for the finished product.

“That was for the network,” Kitsis admits. “This presentation was really just going to be an internal document. As Adam and I say, it was just tinkering in a laboratory. We added on four days at the end with our crew. But then they were like ‘let’s show it [the presentation]!’ And we were like ‘okay.’ The Storybrooke stuff was really just our way of saying ‘we’re going to have a Storybrooke piece that we can’t film right now’,” he explains.

“It’s not canon, but it’s sort of meant to be a hint of how we are going to approach the opening of this show,” Adam adds. “There still is Storybrooke in the premiere, but it plays in a way that hopefully is welcoming to both fans of Once and newcomers.”

Once Upon A Time In Wonderland premieres October 10 on ABC. If you haven’t seen it yet, here is the fantastic trailer for this new series, which will air on Thursdays starting October 10: