Everywhere You Look

Everywhere You Look
Dane La Born

Dane La Born

Netflix recently debuted the first season of Fuller House, a continuation of the culturally beloved series Full House which aired when I was a kid. Critics widely panned the show, The AV Club going so far as to call it “a porn parody without the porn,” and while that was one of the worst, it captured the general critical vibe the show had. I loved it, though.

Where critics went wrong with Fuller House were their expectations. They seemed to be expecting a modern sitcom to spawn out of the cheese and laugh-tracks of the late 80s and early 90s era of sitcoms. It’s been almost 30 years since the Tanner family graced our Friday nights, but the way Fuller House plays out, it may as well have been five minutes. Everyone in the cast seems like they feel so comfortable with those characters and with their co-stars that even with all of the cheese, and the incredibly unnatural dynamics of a television family, they still feel like a family.

My family has pretty much just been my mother and me my entire life. The majority of the friends I grew up with, actually, had parents that were split, step-parents, or something other than a mother, father, and sibling. The television dynamics of family, give or take an ABC show in which their odd family situation is literally the title of the show, are always pretty much the same, and they have been since sitcoms became a thing.

It was shows like Leave It To Beaver that set that standard formula: a mother, a father, and two kids. Anything more than that, and it becomes the focus of the show. Full House or Malcolm In The Middle for instance. There haven’t been that many family sitcoms that portray a family that I, and millions of others, would be able to relate to.

Why would they, though? Realistically portraying a family doesn’t make for good comedy. A single Mom meets a soon-to-be-abusive guy who becomes stepfather to her only son, an alcoholic father abandons his flesh and blood, a mother dying in bed heartbroken and unable to move without excruciating pain: these are all the contents of a serious HBO drama, not an upbeat comedy.

So, as so often happens when it comes to the fictional worlds we like to escape to, things are idealized. The darker dynamics of family, the screaming fights and racist relatives, are left behind for more wacky elements. Even with shows like both Full and Fuller House, which start out with the death of the main character’s spouse in each instance, quickly escape to the heartfelt world of snappy one-liners and cheesy exit lines.

For me, that’s an ever-present, bittersweet reminder of the things I never got to experience. That’s okay though, because while it’s true that I never experienced them in life, I did get to experience them every Friday night sitting next to my Mom on the couch.

Critics were hard on Fuller House because they were expecting the panache given to modern sitcoms, but what they got was a family sitcom that felt like it walked straight out of a time machine. Interestingly, if somewhat unsurprisingly, it’s families that are praising the show the highest. While television studios have been hyper-focused on providing viewers with a higher concept, highbrow form of comedy, every one of them save for ABC has forgotten about the old fashioned family sitcom, where everything is pretty much sunshine and rainbows, and even if it’s not, you’re sure to learn a valuable life lesson by the time the credits role. Television had lost that optimism, and maybe Fuller House’s success on Netflix is the thing needed to remind them that it’s okay for things to be simple sometimes.

Categories: Commentary