BUT I HAVE TO. It's just who I am. And annoying is part of the package.
I just finished watching Season 2 of "Fuller House" during my post-finals crash. This show has gotten a lot of flack, and it's easy to see why. It is a truly terrible show. The acting is dreadful, the storylines are totally implausible, Carly Rae Jepsen's squeaky version of the theme song sucks. And the writers seemed to do nothing but swap some genders, upcycle some old jokes, and ride the wave of 90's girl nostalgia to the top.
I personally love it though. It's cheesy, cheeky, and delightfully meta; at least once per episode the show pokes fun at itself. Precocious and hilarious 8-year-old Max has singlehandedly replenished my supply of one-liners. It might be tempting for the newest gen of moms to plop down with our kids down in front of the show with the same indiscretion that our moms let us watch "Full House" after school in the 90s. HOWEVER, the reboot of "Full House" is not a show for kids, especially young girls. And not because of the tongue-in-cheek sex jokes, which I personally am 100% here for. It's because "Fuller House" shows us just how far women's roles in TV have NOT come in the past 20 years. Let me explain.
Season 2 starts with 38-soon-to-be-39-but-doesn't-look-a-day-over-25-year-old DJ trying to choose between two sweet, adorable men who are crazy about her for seemingly no other reason than that she's a cute, perky vet who wakes up with perfectly tousled hair and a statement necklace. DJ has spent THREE WHOLE MONTHS "finding herself," and is ready to pick a man to live happily ever after with. Not so fast. Because it's only Episode 1 of Season 2. She finds out that over the summer while she was working on herself, they both went out and got girlfriends. Which is a perfectly normal thing to do. DJ is distraught. She runs into the arms of her best friend Kimmy Gibbler and exclaims, "I just want a boyfriend!"
Now let's put this into perspective. Danny, DJ's dad and counterpart in the OG "Full House," Had THREE girlfriends throughout the whole EIGHT seasons of the show, the first of which he didn't even meet until Season 5. Danny didn't need to date. He had his hands full with three daughters, a house, and his crazy houseguests. He was able to find fulfillment in other ways---cleaning, his career, hugging, and most of all, his family.
But DJ, being a lot of things her father wasn't but most noticeably female, simply doesn't feel "fulfilled" until she has a guy. And no one tries to talk her out of it. Her sister, Stephanie, immediately takes her out to meet more guys. And let's remember, DJ's husband has been dead for no more than two years, considering her youngest is barely learning to walk. Everyone heals on their own timeline, but girl really?
The other female protagonists aren't granted a much better deal. In Season 1, Kimmy was in the process of divorcing her scumbag (but totally dreamy) Latin husband Fernando after he was unfaithful to her their entire marriage. One would hope that Kimmy would embark on a journey of self-discovery and be the awesome, loud, kind of slutty divorcee of the group, but NOT SO FAST. Fernando apologizes. So naturally Kimmy takes him back, and in Season 2 they are once again engaged. And she is not awesome, just spectacularly annoying.
To be fair, Fernando really seems like a changed man. He adores Kimmy, and as far as we know has not taken any more paramours. However, the same situation seems to be playing out for Kimmy's 13-year-old daughter, Ramona. Ramona's first kiss is with a miniature smarmy douchenozzle named Popko, whom she doesn't even like. When she starts to catch feelings for Popko after their kiss, she finds out he has a girlfriend, and he is a complete asshole to her about it. She has a 0.2-episode recovery time, which is great. But then Popko breaks up with his girlfriend and tries to get with Ramona. She rightfully rejects him, and then in true fuccboi fashion, he gets butthurt and posts an embarrassing video of her online. DJ's son Jackson gets him back for her, and the whole thing resolves by the end of the episode.
A few eps later, it's New Years and Popko wants Ramona to be his New Year's kiss. She says no. So he apologizes for the video. That seems to do the trick. She grabs his stupid douchey face and kisses him. The audience track goes "WHOOOOOO" when it really should be going "EEEEEWWWW." This isn't sexy. It's a 13-year-old girl already getting manipulated by men who think they can just say "sorry," and whether or not they actually mean it, they can still get what they want.
Girls, women, boys, men, young and old, need to know this: people do not change so easily.
Girls, women, boys, men, young and old, need to know this: people do not change so easily.
I actually had hope for Stephanie. She has grown up to be a badass globe-trotting rockstar/DJ who plays at Coachella and has a string of foreign boyfriends. But that couldn't possibly make her happy. No, her real happiness is in co-parenting her nephews, because what woman could possibly find happiness in a successful career, music, meeting cool people, and traveling? It's really raising kids that makes it all worth it. Well, we find out Stephanie can't have her own kids. She seems to be content with helping DJ raise her kids (who seem to be raising themselves while DJ chases tail), until aunt Becky adopts a kid. Aaaah Becky, you had to go f**k things up. Becky, who is also unfulfilled by a wildly successful career, being adored by millions, and reverse-aging like Benjamin Button, decides to adopt a baby. In a huge plug for adoption, Stephanie suggests to her boyfriend of literally four months that adoption is still an option for them, even if she can't have kids. YAY STEPHANIE! She still has a chance at what is apparently the only meaningful life for women!
With all that ^ being said, I should also say that I do not believe that being a wife and mother is any less noble than being any other kind of thing. It is one of the most important and rewarding roles a woman can take on. But it's not the only role that can make a woman happy. "Fuller House" not only suggests that it is, but asserts that it is. And I get it. I get what kind of show this is. It's a stupid sitcom. It's probably mostly 20-and 30-whatever-year-old women watching it anyway. But we need to be aware of the messages that not just our girls are getting, but that we are getting as well. We are all hopefully aware that we can be multidimensional beings; we can be real, discrete people outside of being someone's wife or someone's girlfriend or someone's mom. TV just doesn't know that yet. They don't know us like they should.
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