Adam Horowitz, usually writing with Edward Kitsis, is good at giving fantastical stories recognisable human worries. We like the warmth of his work, but the complicated plotting too often gets in the way.
Fi1m perspective
In Once Upon a Time (2011), familiar fairy-tale figures have lives to get on with in a modern town. Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz make that an inviting prospect: knowing the stories gives us a way into the characters without having to learn everything from scratch. The pleasure is in seeing people we think we know given room to surprise us. The trouble begins when explaining how their stories connect takes up time better spent letting them do something. That is our reservation about Horowitz as a storyteller: he cares about his characters, but can make keeping up with them unnecessarily hard.
The partnership with Kitsis runs through almost all his writing credits, so treating Horowitz as a solitary author would be misleading. Their staff work included One Tree Hill (2003), where the believable teenage hurt offers more interest than the familiar family quarrels. They joined Lost (2004) in 2005, working within an ensemble drama whose achievements cannot be assigned to any one writer. We found Lost frightening because the ensemble made the strangers’ struggle to survive feel urgent. The habit of postponing answers remains a frustration, but the cast gives us reasons to stay.
Their screenplay for Tron: Legacy (2010) puts a father-and-son story inside the science fiction. Creating and running Once Upon a Time for seven seasons gave them much more room to follow characters over time. That makes the series the clearest place to judge their preference for large casts and interconnected stories. We rate it more cautiously than Lost: the warmth and the cast make the sillier passages enjoyable, while the solemn fairy-tale flashbacks slow things down. Familiar characters help a fantasy get started, but they do not remove the need to choose which stories deserve the time.
The recurring weakness is the urge to keep adding: more characters, more connections, another use of a device that has already done its job. In the later seasons of Once Upon a Time, plots repeat themselves and too many characters are left without enough depth. There is enough affection for fairy tales here to make the programme worth considering for fantasy enthusiasts. Start with Lost for the stronger ensemble drama; choose Once Upon a Time if its familiar figures matter more to you than tidy plotting.
Biography
Adam Horowitz is an American screenwriter and producer. Born on 4 December 1971 in New York City, he attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he met his frequent writing partner Edward Kitsis.
Horowitz and Kitsis began working together on series including Fantasy Island, Felicity and Popular. They joined the writing staff of Lost midway through its first season in 2004 and contributed episodes throughout its run. The pair co-created the series Once Upon a Time (2011), on which Horowitz also served as a writer, producer and director. They co-wrote the screenplay for TRON: Legacy (2010).
Horowitz and the Lost writing team won a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Dramatic Series in 2006 and received further nominations for the series.
