Season 5 Reviewed

Reviewing every episode of Full House in chronological order is really starting to wear me down, you guys.  I can’t believe that there’s three more Seasons of this shit.  I just can’t stand it.

So I always like to start these Season reviews by telling all you readers how much I love you.  I sure do love you guys!  Don’t forget to check out the Gentlemen of Leisure Blog, lots of which is written by Teebore, the guy who writes the best comments on FHR.  Oh, Teebore!  Without you I am nothing!  Full House Reviewed also had a couple of babies this Season, and by that I mean that a few people started their own every-episode-reviewed weekly blogs and didn’t stop after two entries. So check out He-Man Reviewed and Family Matters Reviewed, and if anyone else wants to take on the daunting, menial task of reviewing every episode of some shitty show, feel free to send that shit my way (billysuperstar@gmail.com).  I’m waiting for Small Wonder Reviewed, personally.

There’s also a review blog for WCW Monday Nitro, which is part of a larger site called Smashville Wrestling.  Some of the guys from the site invited me to be on their podcast and I was like, “what an honor!”  So if you ever wanted to hear me being interviewed about FHR and discussing Wrestlemania 6, now’s your chance!

Also, thanks to FHR fan Tiffiana who bought me the Season 5 DVD’s!  Also, shout-outs to Tena Rentaira, who just the other day become the 1,000th fan on FHR’s Facebook page.  There’s some pretty neat stuff over there sometimes so you should be a fan if you’re not already.  Finally, shout-outs to Jane Hegarty, who’s been reading Full House Reviewed for at least a year and has no idea that we were friends in high school.

What other business to attend to before I move on to the review?  Oh yeah, buy a Full House Reviewed T-shirt!  Also, for of you that have commented on how shitty the archives are, I am sorry!  Yes, they are pretty shitty.  If I were tech savvy, I’d fix them right away!  Someday someone will help me to make them better.  Some fateful day, this will happen.  Finally, I guess the FHR message board didn’t really work out.  I don’t really know anything about message boards and this stupid blog already keeps me pretty busy so I have no idea how to spruce it up.  We had a pretty neat haiku competition over there but I guess after that it kind of ran its course.

Ok, that’s enough site-related bullshit.  On to Season 5 Reviewed!

So what went down in Season 5?  The big event was Jesse and Becky’s babies being born, which brought us a lot of incredibly boring scenes of their bland parenting.  If there was any sort of a story arch that ran throughout the Season, it was that of Jesse neglecting his role as a stay-at-home dad in pursuit of his ridiculous music career.  Jesse went from being a shitty, self-centered husband to a negligent, narcissistic father this Season, a personal journey that surprised no one.  The Season climaxed with Jesse’s first music video, a cover of the Beach Boys song, “Forever,” airing on MTV.  This was easily one of the most anticipated moments in the comments on this site and it was actually one that I’d never seen before.  Now that I have, it’s not hard to recognize that it’s one of the most stand-out awful moments in the series, but I’m still sticking to my claim that Michelle and her classmates singing “Twist and Shout” at her kindergarten graduation in Season 4 was the worst moment in the history of the series.  We’ve got three Seasons left to dethrone it but i don’t know, you guys, that shit was pretty unbearable.  Even worse than creepy little baby feet that I’m pretty sure are meant to be erotic.

Just like in previous Seasons, none of the other characters evolved in any way whatsoever.  Joey actually got a job, which was kind of surprising, but I wouldn’t really call him walking around in a ranger suit with a puppet all the time character development.  The only thing about him that’s ever really developed is how much weirder it gets that he even lives in the full house anymore.  The girls are all older now and he even has a pretty good career going, so what the fuck is he still doing there?  He finally cashed in from hanging around Danny all the time, so why not go get his own place?  It doesn’t help that I fucking hate his guts, but even if he was a tolerable person who was just there to help out, I think it would be fair to call it time to move on.

DJ got her own room and maintained her role as the only character on the show that actually seems like she could be a real person.  Stephanie continued to be a big obnoxious piece of shit, and I don’t understand why this show, with all of it’s continuity flaws, couldn’t have done us the courtesy of having her disappear without explanation.  And then there’s Michelle.  She really ramped it up this Season, starting with her catch phrase, “Duh!” which was in just about every single episode.  I don’t know why having this hideous little girl deliver inept line readings of obnoxious phrases and shove food in her mouth was considered such quality family entertainment.

In keeping with Full House’s oldest tradition, there were several love interests introduced and made out to be a big deal, only to disappear shortly afterwards.  Joey was actually banging Danny’s sister for a minute until she was never seen or heard from again.  There was also Vicky, who temporarily replaced Becky on Wake Up, San Francisco and then started banging Danny until she moved back to somewhere or other.  Vicky was so uninteresting that I had to go back and make sure that this was the Season that she was in because she left so little of an impression.  This brings me to a few rules I’ve noticed about women in the full house:  1)  They are only allowed into the full house if they are someone’s love interest, and even then only for the duration of the time that they are a love interest, which could end abruptly at any time with no mention.  2)  There doesn’t have to be any characteristics to these women other than that they are a love interest.  Sure, it helps give them a little flair, like if they’re a zookeeper or have a messy apartment or something, but if their only initial characteristic is that Danny wants to fuck them then that’s probably all that you’re ever going to learn about them.

I find this latest distillation of Full House’s total disregard towards women particularly remarkable when addressing another question I’ve mulled over throughout the course of this blog:  who the fuck ever actually watched this show?  After paying attention to the comments for a year or so and checking out the site’s demographics on Facebook, I think I may have arrived at an answer:  young girls.  I guess it sort of makes sense that young girls watched this show in the late 80’s and early 90’s, because it’s sort of a little girl fantasy in a lot of ways.  These three young girls have absolute power in their household, and are constantly appeased by their three doting, mildly-incompetent, non-threatening dads, with no mom to compete with except the later addition of Aunt Becky, who’s really more of a big sister type and is so completely oppressed by her relationship with Uncle Jesse that she plays no part in any household power dynamic anyway.  So maybe Michelle being so fucking pushy and obnoxious all the time appealed to little girls who wanted to get away with that same behavior?  Also apparently John Stamos is a real good looking man, which I never really think about.  So is that enough to explain why this shit was on tv?

One last thing I’ll comment on before moving on to Season 6 is another element that’s changed remarkably since the series began, which is the production design.  I think I’m pointing it out a few Seasons too late, but the first few Seasons definitely had a more grainy, dull palette with more browns and yellows and as the show progressed it became more brightly lit and featured more primary colors, so it always sort of looks like it’s inside of a McDonalds or something.  I think that this visual approach had something to do with the show’s appeal, too.  It’s like some sort of evil hypnosis.

So was Season 5 the worst one so far?  Yeah, I guess it was.  It’s become pretty clear by now that this show is just going to get worse and worse.  How am I supposed to deal with this fact and still stay on task?  Sometimes I think about all the things I could have done with the time I’ve spent reviewing 5 Seasons of Full House and I’m reminded that life is fleeting and one day we’ll all be dead.  This fills me with a deep sense of loss and dread that I can only escape by reminding myself that I don’t have time to dwell upon an existential crisis because all my spare time must be filled with reviewing the last three Seasons of this shitty show.