Fuller House Review

Netflix reopens the Tanner house thirty years on and hands the keys to the same creator, the same set and the same theme song, and roughly two thirds of critics came out against it. Both of the aggregate scales park it in the territory a network reserves for something it has stopped defending. The objection is not that it is old fashioned. Multi camera comedy with a studio audience is a live form and can still be excellent.

The objection is that the show mistakes recognition for a joke. Candace Cameron Bure, Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber are affable and game, and they are handed scripts that stop dead every few minutes so somebody can say a catchphrase from 1991 and wait for the applause. The absence of the Olsen twins becomes a running gag about the absence of the Olsen twins. Story barely exists, conflicts resolve in a hug and a lesson, and the sentimental closing beat arrives whether or not anything has happened to earn it.

The staging is competent and completely inert, three cameras on a set built to be photographed exactly as its predecessor was. Audiences were considerably kinder than the press, which is the whole truth about it. As a delivery mechanism for the sound of 1991 it works, and that is the entire commission. Judged as a comedy, the thing it is actually sold as, almost nothing in it is written, performed or staged to be funny on its own terms, and a show that will not attempt the job it is named for has no floor left to stand on.