Fuller House was a show created and released to make money through evoking nostalgia. And while the intent was there, there is a lot missing. Nostalgia is great when done right, but the series felt forced and the end prolonged.
Taking the characters we all knew best as children, DJ, Stephanie, and Kimmy, brought a bit more sadness to the series than anyone wanted or expected. Seeing the same set slightly different and the children grown up after an extremely long hiatus was somewhat unsettling. It had a way of putting me off from the show after just one season. These characters, once so bright and energetic, are all now adults in a place they don’t necessarily want to be.
With history repeating itself, DJ is left single with three children of her own, and that is disheartening to watch. However, it is something the show should’ve played into. Instead, the show used most of the first season to introduce us to the quirky new characters and throw DJ into a love triangle almost immediately. Now, at this point, DJ has lost her mother at a young age, and her husband before her children are even that old. The series could have added a ton of emotional depth but instead avoided serious moments almost entirely.
While the lack of emotion in the writing is upsetting, I think the lack of emotion in the actors is just as jarring. I’d like to point out that it is not for lack of talent, but more of a lack of training. All three of these girls started acting as children, Jodie Sweetin being only 5 years old when she accepted the role. Being groomed to act when they were so young, it came easy to them to portray those characters for the next 8 years of their lives. And yet all three of these women had very few acting jobs in the 21 years between Full House and Fuller House. The most likely reason that they were so good in Full House is that it was all they knew how to do. But after extensive time off from acting, they weren’t quite as well suited for the job.
I don’t mean to come after the acting abilities of these three women, but the Olsen twins turned down the job for this reason, essentially. They had been so long away from the world of acting that they knew it wasn’t right for them.
There’s even less development in the new child stars. While the Tanner children had depth, the Fuller children feel like caricatures, each with a very specific trait that becomes their whole personality. And, going off of this, I think the three main characters also became caricatures of their old selves.
DJ was always the really responsible one, so they made her into a goody-two-shoes, even though that’s not at all who she was in Full House. DJ tended to be responsible but she made a lot of careless, teenage mistakes. Stephanie was always fairly smart for her age and very spirited. In Fuller House, she became a very carefree person with few responsibilities. However, Kimmy actually stayed the same for the most part.
During the episodes where the “adults” from Full House guest-starred, it definitely made it feel a little more at home. But the reason that the Full House house felt so good was that everything that happened there had meaning and felt new. Fuller House felt like each plot point was being pushed and repetitive. It lacked the breath of fresh air that Full House had as a sitcom whose main focus was on family values and parental love.
Fuller House isn’t horrible, it just doesn’t give me the nostalgia that I believe it was setting out for. Nevertheless, it’s always nice to know that characters continue to grow long after a series ends.
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