'Fuller House' bosses answer burning question: Are the Tanners cursed?
Fuller House has officially been unleashed upon a the world.
At the stroke of midnight on the west coast, Netflix officially released the 13-episode first season of its Full House spinoff. And if you've seen the first installment, you may find yourself asking a logical question: Is the Tanner family cursed?
Warning: Spoilers for Episode 1 of Fuller House ahead.
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As the episode opens, it's been one year since D.J. and her three young boys moved into her old San Francisco homestead with her father, Danny, following the death of her firefighter husband. The family has gathered to bid Danny farewell as he prepares to relocate to Los Angeles, where he and Becky will be hosting a new national morning talk show. First, though, they're having one last family reunion (minus Michelle, natch) before he sells the house.
By the end of the 30-minute pilot, though, plans have changed: Danny is giving the house to D.J. so she and the boys can live there. And, surprise, Stephanie and Kimmy Gibbler are moving in to help her out.
Sound familiar? As the pilot not-so-subtly points out, Danny found himself in exactly the same spot years ago, following the death of his wife.
Oddly, Danny and D.J. don't talk about their parallel stories all that much in the first episode -- but it's certainly a conversation that creator Jeff Franklin and executive producer Bob Boyett had leading up to the show's conception.
"I struggled with that decision -- to do that to DJ -- because it does feel that way," he says when the curse theory is half-jokingly proposed.
"It does feel like there's some Tanner curs,e and how coincidental is it that the same thing happen to her that happened to Danny," he continued, "but I love the fact that the set up is the same. I love that this show mirrors the old one, so I was sort of willing to live with criticisms for doing that, to get the benefits of that kind of storytelling, and rooting for your characters."
Other options were posed -- for example, having D.J. be divorced or separated -- but Boyett says much of the audience's emotional investment will come from seeing D.J. carry so much weight on her own.
"We wanted to put the responsibility on her shoulders as a single mom. And any circumstance in which we left her husband alive -- whether it was divorce or him working in Afghanistan or any situation like that -- the audience would ultimately want him back in the series," he said.
"We wanted the stakes to be high for her -- as they are in real life. Mothers who get abandoned for any reason ... they're suddenly saddled with a huge responsibility."
This wasn't the only huge decision the writers had to make. Since the show picks up more than 20 years after we last saw the family, they also had to fill in the blanks of what everyone's been up to since the curtain fell on Full House.
For D.J., that meant a career as a vet in addition to her three children. For Stephanie, she's got a job as a DJ. (Yes, she's DJ Tanner.) And Kimmy is a party planner with an estranged husband, with whom she has a daughter.
"We went through a whole bunch of ideas, and I just sort of landed on what seemed to feel right," says Franklin. "But DJ was always an animal lover, so that kind of made sense. Stephanie was always rambunctious and a little wild, so it made sense she was going to be a free spirit. Kimmy was the hardest to figure out because she was so out there."
In Kimmy's case, the team decided it was ultimately best to lean into her history of being quirky and offbeat.
"It seemed more interesting, I think, to have her, instead of marrying a nerd from Silicon Valley, actually end up with a great looking guy, and for her to break the boundaries a little bit by having a cross-cultural marriage and a biracial child," says Boyett. "That all seemed very contemporary; that's what the world is. We thought it would be very relatable to our audience."
Overall, Franklin says, "I'm hoping the audience is happy with our choices. I think they will be. And it's just fun to catch up with them and see where they go from here."
Fuller House Season 1 is now streaming on Netflix.
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Sandra Gonzalez was a Senior Television Reporter at Mashable. A Texas native, she spent almost four years in New York City before leaving the land of superstorms for Los Angeles, where she was introduced to these terrifying things called "rolling earthquakes."Previously, she was with Entertainment Weekly, where she wrote about every show that could fit into her perfectly crafted TV schedule and anything ever touched by Shonda Rhimes.You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @theSandraG
