House Divided (Full House)

By: James Kaplan

Writer/producer Jeff Franklin is telling me, over the phone, how he created Full House a decade ago: "I was really just trying to come up with a kind of buddy show that I hadn't seen before. A group of men raising kids together, that seemed like an interesting idea," he says. "It turned out I accidentally tapped into what a lot of women hoped men would be like, that they'd put family and child-rearing ahead of everything else in life."

That wasn't the only way fortune shone on Franklin. "We really struck gold with the cast," he says. "The Olsen twins and everyone were wonderful. We just got lucky." Very lucky. Full House was a raging hit on ABC for most if its eight seasons before it got canceled last year. Starting in 1991, the show got a second life in syndication, where it remains a success story today, the third-highest-rated syndicated series among kids, behind The Simpsons and Home Improvement. But the ABC run of Full House is interesting for its rise as well as its fall.

The sitcom came on the air in the heyday of the early-evening family show. It left as the networks, concerned that parents and children were increasingly pursuing their TV tastes separately, started to make shows for the specific age groups within the household. '

Initially appealing to the whole bunch of us, Full House began to lose its grip on older viewers. "Our original theory with Full House was, the kids'll watch it and tell their parents," Franklin says. That theory worked like a charm for five seasons. Then, according to the show's creator, those all-important 18 to 49 year-olds, the people TV advertisers most want to sell stuff to, started to wander off.

I caught up again with Full House recently, along with my 7-year-old and 4-year-old. The syndicated shows, from the series' first season, looked as if they'd come from a time warp. John Stamos sang in a doo-wop group; Baby Michelle, a.k.a. Ashley and Mary Kate Olsen, had barely teethed. The pre-America's Funniest Home Videos Bob Saget seemed less than certain of his funniness. Everything looked fresh and innocent. My boys loved it.

At its best, Full House wasn't much more than eye candy. But we all need a little candy. "The essential theme of the show," Franklin says, "always remained the same: how they all worked it out together. We wanted people to feel good when they watched." It seems sad that -- in today's prime-time network landscape, anyway -- there's no room for sentiment like that.