Once Upon a Time (2011–18) uses the police procedural television series format to draw equivalency between this form and the Disney fairy tale. However, in its treatment of this material, it exemplifies how neither the justice of the small-town sheriff nor the medievalism-informed otherworld exists. Once Upon a Time enacts a fairy tale of justice and punishment coded through fairy-tale mores of good and evil, but as the show continues, the storylines extend and expand, and both narrative structures begin to break and thereby provoke questions about what justice looks like and who it is for in both the fairy tale and the police procedural.
Michelle Anya Anjirbag (Sun,) studied this question.