Fuller House is Ill Focused and Uninteresting By Sydney Quanz

Although I was born in 1997, two years after the last episode of Full House aired, I still grew up seeing the reruns on TV. Not to mention my 12 year old sister who recorded half the series on our DVR. For the past year in a half, it has not been an uncommon sight to see my sister plopped on the couch watching the Tanner family hug it out after a long talk that effectively resolved the mildly engaging conflict. However, when I heard that they were rebooting the series I was interested. Not interested enough to watch it, but interested enough to maybe watch an episode with my sister while attempting to bond with her.

Then I got sick. So I binged watched the first 6 episodes.  I was incredibly disappointed. I mean, I got to call in to work and criticize something, but I wasn’t incredibly entertained. The show was nostalgic to fault, ill fit for its audience and essentially dull.

The pilot barely qualifies as an episode. The first 15 minutes was half applause as old cast members entered and smiled right at the audience, hardly in character. My first thought was, “Oh look, it’s John Stamos, Davy Coulier and Bob Saget doing a sketch. I’ve seen this on SNL, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon before.” It was jammed packed with too familiar tag lines, references to half the events in the old series and the exact plot of the original pilot. DJ Tanner is a widow forced to raise three kids alone, and ends up living with her sister Stephanie, who is now a professional DJ, and her old friend Kimmy and her daughter. Here we are with a carbon copy of the male trio in the first series. DJ is the widowed mom with a professional career, Stephanie the “cool” relative pursuing music and Kimmy the wacky, offbeat friend. Obviously, I suspected it would be similar to the original series, but I wasn’t expecting a second-generation gender swap with nothing fresh or new.

The one element that is fresh is the sexual innuendos littered throughout the entire show. There are jokes about boobs, masturbation and hooking up in the first three episodes. The three women go on a “girls night out” where they do shots, dance sexually with other men and wear revealing dresses. In one episode, DJ mistakes an online date for a plumber and mistakenly engages in extremely suggestive dialogue. Full House is supposed to be a family friendly sitcom directed at families with reasonably young children. It would have been smart to rerelease the series targeted at the kids who grew up with the original series and their families, something that could be enjoyed by everyone. Instead, Fuller House is a ill focused mixed between How I Met Your Mother and a daytime Disney show. It constantly flips back and forth between Stephanie using her nephews to land cute guys and the kids having trouble at school.

Fuller House is uninteresting, based in the past and to adult for the audience who will appreciate the corny humor. This series is just another victim of the reboot generation, that is unable to create new ideas and is content to destroy old ones.