On the morning of February 26th, I woke up, made my morning coffee and opened my laptop to check my email and schoolwork. Then I remembered; it was February 26th. That meant that the "Full House" revival series, "Fuller House," was finally available on Netflix.
Every weekend I watched Danny Tanner, Uncle Joey and Uncle Jessie and the whole squad. I grew up with D.J., Stephanie, and Michelle. I laughed, I cried and learned so many life lessons from the "Full House" on syndication.
So imagine my excitement when I found out that Netflix was producing a revival series. I have been waiting for this for almost a year.
"Fuller House" only has 13 episodes so it was pretty easy to breeze through season one. The new plotline follows D.J. Fuller (her new last name) and her three sons as they move back into her childhood home after her husband dies in a firefighting accident. Her sister Stephanie and life-long best friend Kimmy Gibbler volunteer to move in as to help her out with the kids. So the story is very similar to the original.
So many things are different in the Tanner house since the first episode almost 30 years ago. Danny and Rebecca are moving to L.A. to host a new morning talk show, Uncle Jessie is going as well to write music for a soap opera and Uncle Joey lives in Las Vegas doing a comedy show at The Venetian. D.J. works as a vet at a pet clinic with super cute Matt and even her old high school flame Steve makes an appearance. Of course, the absence of Michelle sucks but there are some (interesting) references to her throughout the season.
I am not going to give too many details because some people may not have finished or even started watching it but to me it was an overall okay.
The entire plot revolves around D.J. and some sub-plots pertaining to Stephanie and Kimmy in their lives. Kimmy’s side story is quite solid; it involves her struggling with her feelings towards her (almost) ex-husband. Stephanie’s subplot is not quite as strong. All of it seems to be a bit over the place, from her pursuing her career of being a D.J. and (cleverly) steals the name D.J. Tanner and singing, to her odd romantic life.
They rely a little too much on flashbacks from the original show which is nice at the beginning but gets old pretty quick. Danny, Joey, Jesse, Rebecca and Steve are only guest stars that occasionally make appearances other than episode one. The kids of the show have similar roles as the original kids but the show added another character, Ramona, Kimmy’s daughter. It’s different from "Full House" because the main focus isn’t on raising the kids but more on the lives of the adults, so it’s not really relatable to a younger audience.
Unfortunately, the nostalgia gets to be a bother and some of the writing is a little patchy because it seems that they are trying to hard to force “modern” topics into the plot. Like “kids nowadays spend too much time online” and stuff like selfies and other 21st century-isms that don’t need to be awkwardly forced down the audience throats (We already experienced that with "Girl Meets World"). Whatever happened to predictability? Well, some of the story lines were a little too predictable.
Over all, I would say that the show does work when it focuses on developing new stories and not overly on the past, but of course, it is awesome to see these beloved characters on my screen once again.
