Once Upon a Time season 7 ups Mekia Cox to series regular

Mekia Cox

Earlier this summer Chicago Med actress Mekia Cox was cast on Once Upon a Time season 7 in the recurring role of Tiana. The character is the lead in The Princess and the Frog, a popular Disney movie and one of many stories that will be told on the upcoming batch of episodes.

Now, we’re learning that we’re going to be seeing much more of Tiana than we first thought. According to a new report coming in right now via Entertainment Weekly, Cox has been promoted to series regular for the show, meaning that there’s a chance that Tiana could be sticking around all season in one form or another. She joins Gabrielle Anwar, Diana Ramirez, and many other new additions (read more over at the link here) who do officially have this promotion and are going to be a big part of what is the show’s new/evolved story. There is a new setting now in Hyperion Heights (a community in Seattle), which is going to contain a combination of fairy-tale characters and real-life people, or at least real-life people through the lens of the show.

In speaking a little more about the plans for Tiana, which include meeting her mother and seeing her Hyperion Heights alter ego of Sabine, executive producer Adam Horowitz said the following to  the aforementioned website:

“We’re not redoing the movie, but we’re taking it as a jumping off point … We have a OUAT spin.”

The show at one point did have a good reputation of altering movies and Disney lore slightly in order to give the show more of a separate identity, but we do think over time that they faltered with this here and there. Take, for example, with the Frozen arc where it just felt as though the producers for the show were just telling their own live-action version of the movie, and there wasn’t really all that much that was different at all. The first season was probably the best in terms of giving you surprising twists to fairy-tale stories, which is why it is probably so good that the show is moving its way back towards that format once again. We’ll see how Mekia Cox fits in with the rest of the cast, but we also just have to see how this entire cast fits in together since this is a very different group of people who are a part of the show this time around. Robert Carlyle, Colin O’Donoghue, and Lana Parrilla are the only regulars from the first seven seasons of the show who are staying put.

Are you happy about the Mekia Cox – Once Upon a Time promotion?

Be sure to share some of your thoughts on that subject in the comments! Meanwhile, be sure to visit the link here in the event that you do want to get some other news on a big subject: The mystery alter ego of Rumpelstiltskin in this community. (Photo: ABC.)

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