once upon a time

It seems like ancient history now, but once upon a time, there was a little backdoor pilot that dreamed of growing up to be a full-fledged reality television spectacle.

And yet while I felt distinctly ill at ease, shaken by what I had seen at the museum and memorial, within hours I began to feel powerful for the part I had played once upon a time as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement.

For the stunt community, the lack of Oscar recognition had become a source of increasingly bitter frustration, starkly highlighted by Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” which finally landed Pitt an Oscar for his turn as a grizzled 1960s stuntman.

Maybe it’s inevitable that "Black Mirror," once upon a time a show of unnerving political and social prescience, would become not simply passé but past expiration.

That contemporary art might be a dubious realm populated by frauds and charlatans seems quaint today, but once upon a time it was a standard assumption.