Will Once Upon a Time, Grimm Fall to Fairy-Tale Curse?

So far both new fall shows look to be avoiding poisoned apples—and poisonous low TV ratings

Once Upon a Time's a hit in its early going. Grimm showed life in the dead zone that's Friday night.

But fairy tales aren't police procedurals. They don't have a prime-time track record.  Not a good one, anyway.

They might even be cursed.

If you were to count all the long-running fairy-tale series on your fingers, you'd have plenty of free digits, even if you counted Linda Hamilton's Beauty and the Beast—a few times.

Prior to this fall, prime-time's last major attempt at a fairy tale was Pushing Daisies, which died of low ratings in 2009.

But things may be changing.

Coming off a big premiere, Once Upon a Time held steady on Sunday night, scoring 11.7 million viewers, and snaring enough 18-to-49-year-olds to finish 17th in Nielsen's weekly demo standings.

In its debut in a no-win time slot that put in not only on a Friday, but pitted it against Game 7 of the World Series, Grimm didn't lose. It managed 6.6 million viewers, and wound up as NBC's second-biggest series in the weekly demo after The Office.

Time will tell if Once Upon a Time and Grimm are built to last, but the present's promising.   

And that's more than the "happily ever after" genre usually gets.

Other key ratings results:

• The X Factor (15th place, per Nielsen broadcast rankings): The first live-performance show sang.

• Happy Endings (40th place): Shot up even though its lead-in, Modern Family (20th place), aired a rerun. Somebody's turned into a real-live hit.   

• The Simpsons (41st place): Who argued this show was over? The old-timer's annual Halloween offering was up over last year's. 

• It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (44th place): Scored a season-high 18-49 rating for ABC in the 8 p.m., Thursday slot. So, now we know what Charlie's Angels needed: more Linus.

• Pan Am (46th place): Flew up. For a change.   

• Allen Gregory (61st place): Jonah Hill's premiering toon comedy was the weak link for Fox between The Simpsons and Family Guy (50th place).  

• NBC's Thursday lineup: Everything was under a 2.0 demo rating, save The Office (54th place) and Whitney (75th place). 

• Chuck (88th place): Its fifth and final season opened with a, yikes, 1.0 rating in the 18-49. Things can only go up from here? 

• Terra Nova (6.4 million viewers, per overnight estimates) and House (6.5 million viewers): Baseball was good for Fox, but not for these two shows, which both returned kinda cold from their playoff-imposed layoff.

• Rock Center (4.1 million viewers): The new Brian Wiliams newsmag was demographically weaker than the show it replaced, the late Playboy Club.

• Project Runway (34th place): The finale's 3 million viewers was big for the show—for this season, at least.

Here's a complete look at the TV week's Top 10 most-watched broadcast shows:

1. World Series Game 7, 25.4 million viewers
2. Sunday Night Football, 23 million viewers
3. World Series Game 6, 21.1 million viewers
4. NCIS, 19.4 million viewers
5. 60 Minutes, 18.6 million viewers
6. Sunday Night Football pregame, 17.2 million viewers
7. Dancing With the Stars (Monday), 17.17 million viewers
8. NCIS: Los Angeles, 15.9 million viewers
9. Two and a Half Men, 15.3 million viewers
10. The Big Bang Theory, 14.5 million viewers