Fuller House - Season 5 Part 2/Whole Show (Review)
Fuller House Spoiler-Free Review
7/6/20
Fuller House is a show that first premiered as a Netflix Original Series in February of 2016. Full House is a different show that first premiered on ABC in September of 1987. As you can imagine, the show that came nearly 30 years later is a spinoff of said other show. It's honestly hard to say more about Fuller House. Of course, one could go over its good and bad parts, but it has one main flaw that must be pointed out. I'm honestly not sure how many other reviews I'll be echoing in this review, but here we go anyways.
Fuller House is definitely one of those shows that is clearly somewhat bad, but you can't help but watch it all. Out of all these shows, I personally find Fuller House to be one of the best. It never felt repetitive, and while it was predictable, it threw its viewers off enough to not get mad at it. The one complaint I have about this show, and season five in particular, is that the show is exclusively directed at middle-age moms. This allows for plenty of horrid jokes about pop culture and what's "hip with the kids these days" to slip through the writers' fingers. Obviously, this show has this specific target audience for many reasons. First, the show has three middle-age women to make it relatable for said target audience. The show almost entirely follows their troubles and successes with the men and the children they love. Second, the young girls who could relate to the young girls in the original Full House are middle-aged now just like the characters in the show. Of course they're bound to come back and watch the new rendition of their favorite child characters have grown. Though, this brings us back to the main problem; the show is only directed at middle-aged moms.
One of the appeals of the first Full House was that it could be enjoyed by every member of the family. Kids and adults alike could crowd around the TV and relate to certain characters' problems. As a young teenage boy myself, I guess I'm supposed relate to Jackson or Max. Though, this show is so focused around the parents that these boys are given personalities that allows for no relation. I'm more of an introverted nerd myself, and Max is smart, but not nerdy, and Jackson is an outgoing goofball. Of course the character dynamics are like-able, but they're certainly not relatable to everyone. The kids of this show certainly feel like side characters that just help parents relate to the difficulties they spark with the women. I know that it seems dumb for me to critique this new show if it was only intended for adults with about the farthest personalities from my own, but it's not intended that way. This show is rated TV-G, which is the same rating as half of all shows for three or four-year-olds. Let's take the show on Netflix "Workin' Moms" for example. Despite laughing at quite a few of the jokes when it's on, I don't really want to binge watch this show. Probably, because it is directed exclusively at mothers, and it makes this very clear with its high-amount of explicit content. Now, I'm not saying that Fuller House had to have been full of nudity and language, I'm saying that its marketing towards kids and adults alike was a confusing mistake. Perhaps the people in charge feel the need to relate it more to the original Full House, but if it can't be done, they should all accept that and move on.
As much as I focused on this one problem with the show, the rest of the show is actually pretty great. There are a couple of moments that are actually funny, but none that I can recall in the second half of the fifth season. Then again, there are a handful of A or B plots sprinkled throughout this show that are simply the most toothless examples of creative laziness and talentless writing efforts. Though, most of the general stories and daily encounters are pretty well done. Every season, I honestly expected there to be more plots directly parodying the original show, but I was very glad to find that those were rare. Personally, I think they focused a little too much on those when they happened, but not so much that it made me angry. My favorite episode from the second half of the season was probably "Basic Training", because it dealt with an important topic in one plot, and a pretty interesting one in the other. It wasn't the greatest episode by any means, but it wasn't terrible. My least favorite episode from the second half of the season was "College Tours". The first two of this half of the season were probably the worst, but my pick was just full of terrible jokes, dumb plots, and personal pet peeves. Giving the second half of season five a 1-10 using half numbers, I give it a 5.5/10 with a five-word description of: “decent show with stupid parts".
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