Format: Blog
Content: Reviews of Full House Episodes
Author: “Billy Superstar”

You thought you had seen it all on the internet. You thought you could just go to Google and type in whatever nonsense spewed forth from your brain and there would already be hundreds of websites dedicated to that idea. You thought wrong. Apparently there are still uncharted waters in the internet, places that haven’t been discovered and permutations of concepts that haven’t been combined in the combined alchemy of humanity’s collective subconscious. “Billy Superstar” had this exact same conundrum as he attempted to find a blog currently chronicling a sitcom from the late 80s/early 90s, and he decided to take matters into his own hands. That brings us to “Full House” Reviewed.

“Full House” Reviewed attempts to focus on one very specific aspect of American culture and magnify it to extreme proportions by focusing on the minutiae of details in the lives of the Tanner family, as represented by the show Full House. But the fatal flaw of Reviewed is that the author is looking back on the program and criticizing it based on 20 years of advancements in the art form of the half-hour weekly sitcom rather than looking at it from the original context in which the show aired. While this style is often played for laughs, it ultimately creates weaker reviews than those that might analyze the situations and their context a little more in depth. How did Uncle Jessie fit into the post-Regan era America into which he was thrust? What effect did the loss of Danny’s wife have on his ability to stay humorous in dark situations as a morning show host? Was Uncle Joey a pedophile or just a homosexual? These analytical questions and more can be asked (and possibly answered) given the wonder of hindsight, but our author “Billy Superstar” doesn’t use this to his advantage.

Aesthetically, the blog’s layout is clean and neat. “Superstar” has chosen a color palette that recalls the overly effeminate decor of the house in the source material. He’s even given the blog a whimsical header image (an artistic rendering of “Michelle” making a face). My one major gripe is the lack of use of the “more” tag. Obviously “Superstar” is using WordPress to power his blog (also found right here on Tears of Time) so he has access to the “more” tag. For those of you not technologically inclined, “more” gives the audience the title, header image, and a paragraph or two on the front page, leaving the remainder of the post “below the fold.” This allows readers to quickly skim through several posts that they might not be interested in or ones they have already read without requiring them to scroll through thousands of words on a site’s main page while looking for the content they seek (currently “Full House” Reviewed has 14,456 words spaced out over only 10 blog entries according to our estimates, all of which will load every time you visit the page).

As a concept, the blog is great. Who doesn’t want to read smarmy reviews of a show from their childhood? But in execution, Reviewed is lacking. What could be a great medium to express humor while commenting on character development often devolves into mere episode synopses. Occasionally, such as this passage, we see “Superstar” just outlining the beats of the script verbatim:

Danny comes in the room and delivers this really passive-aggressive front to DJ where he acts like he thinks her phone bill is so amusing to him and then he gets all pissed about how big it is. Apparently someone’s been making all of these really expensive calls to Japan but none of the girls will claim responsibility for them. During Danny’s investigation, Stephanie starts ragging on Kimmie Gibbler real hard, and even though her jokes are totally weak, Stephanie gets a big bumptious kick out of her own material.

When attempting to be a source of reviews, Reviewed often misses its mark, but if one were to view it as a negatively stilted, overly verbose archive of episode descriptions for Full House, it exemplifies the genre. Interestingly enough, when clicking on the Archives page of the website, users are greeted with little more than a poorly framed still image of one of the pictures in an episode’s post and nothing more. How are people supposed to navigate when not given an episode title or at least an episode number? Perhaps this blog could benefit from the use of some video commentary from it’s author because I could be missing a key ingredient from its author’s delivery: tone. Obviously the entries are meant to be funny, but something in the delivery gets lost in translation when read off of a dry website.

“Full House” Reviewed isn’t the greatest thing on the planet, and though “Billy Superstar” has spent time writing reviews of about a hundred of these episodes so far (he’s through Season 4), I’m not sure if it’s worth your time to revisit the older entries just to see a synopsis. You’ll probably have a better time actually watching the episodes of Full House yourself, but if you need a quick fix of the show and don’t have access to the DVDs, Reviewed is a great place to turn when you’re lost out there and you’re all alone.

Score: 78/100 (With a little bit of work on making these reviews more concise and a redirected focus on analysis instead of description, “Full House” Reviewed could become a great source of humor. As it stands, simply writing a negative spin on a show that only diehard fans are still watching isn’t all that appealing.)