Newsflash: I was right. A few months ago, I wrote an article
talking about how much I thought that Netflix’s "Fuller House" would suck and, lo and behold, I was right. Not only did I correctly predict that the adventures of a middle-aged DJ Tanner and company would be terrible, but I knew that the show would try so hard to cater to fans of "Full House."What I didn’t expect however, was to last only six minutes when I turned on the first episode. Out of morbid curiosity, my girlfriend and I decided against our better judgement to attempt to watch the pilot episode despite the fact that we could have watched literally anything else. Suffice to say, the first six minutes were near identical to the original show, save for the older members of the cast looking wizened and tired (minus John Stamos, who looked oddly better than he did when he was on the original show). The new members of the cast were also genuinely terrible at acting, but that was no surprise, as the first six minutes didn’t really lend themselves to good character development.
But what was so terrible was the fact that it seemed like the entire cast was collectively mugging at the camera in a way so smug, only a tenured professor who comes into class in board shorts, a stained tank top, flip flops and a mug full of Kahlua who joyfully hands back Fs could understand. Pardon my bizarre metaphor, but you can understand just how miserable these first few minutes were. The cast made jokes about how Nicky and Alex (the twins from the original show) were now D-grade, pot-smoking, surfer students at some stupid community college no one cared about. They made jokes about the Olsen twins being absent from this train wreck of a television production. They made jokes about how old everyone, minus John Stamos, looked.
Simply put, "Fuller House" was so genuinely awful that I couldn’t sit through more than the opening scene. Bob Saget, who’s known for his raunchy and obtuse attempts at “comedy,” has made repeated jokes about having sex with Kimmy Gibbler, who joyfully makes an appearance in the first six minutes. Seeing the two together on the same set made me scream internally knowing that in all the fictional years that the suffix “-er” was added to the original title, that may have become a reality for Danny Tanner. I don’t want to live in a world where that could even remotely be the case.
The new, weird sex and drug jokes, the miserable set and acting and of course, the repeated stabs at nostalgia have colored this whole production as one that can only exist in a vacuum. I sincerely believe that with this drek on the digital television market, Netflix is quickly going to become a place for all the misbegotten television licenses of yesteryear. Netflix is producing more original content by the day and, like I said before, I’m sure old production companies are foaming at the mouth to get more of their schlock on the screen.
