One of my guilty pleasures is watching Greek. I was pretty happy when last week they had an episode called "I know what you did last semester" (Season 3, Episode 11 if anyone wants to watch it). In this episode, they are having a fairytale ball fundraiser for the one sorority whose house got burned down. The sorority who accidentally burned down their house decides that they will all go and support the fundraiser. One of the main characters, Rebecca, is not too thrilled about being forced to go to this ball. She brings up the fact that most fairy tales started out not having a happy ending and specifically mentions Sleeping Beauty being raped by Prince charming.
All throughout the rest of the show, their are a variety of references to fairy tales, such as going costume shopping to find the perfect princess dress for each girl, decorating for the ball and then all of the actual characters at the ball. In an act of protest, Rebecca dresses up at the Evil Queen. She ends up meeting up with another fairytale villain, Evan dressed up as the Big Bad Wolf.
I think overall the fairytale ball was used as a frame for the plot line, in which in the episode itself there were stories that had happy endings (Cappy and Casey), sad endings (Ashleigh and Fisher) and some in between endings (Rebecca and Evan as well as Calvin and Grant). I think it is representative of the various interpretations of fairy tales and the fact that while we are all most familiar with the Disney versions with the happy endings, not all versions have the happy endings.
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I think it's particularly interesting that one of the characters herself points out that fairy tales don't always have happy endings...and some have especially horrific middles, like Sleeping Beauty. Is her protest more than just a device, however? Does her resistance have any impact, or is the fairy tale myth really confirmed by the end of the episode?
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