Fuller House

As revivals go it is more than usually successful and true to the spirit of its predecessor.

There are a few consistent bright spots, including party-girl Stephanie’s interactions with DJ’s annoying (sorry!) kids; the original series’ now-twentysomething fans will likely identify with her more than any other character.

Fuller House isn’t going to win any awards for being exactly what its predecessor was--an utterly formulaic sitcom that ranked among prime-time’s 20 most popular series in four of its eight seasons. But seriously, it’s a surprise to see how well the grown-up Bure, Sweetin and Barber work together in the service of a show that employed them as kids, cast them off and now is welcoming them back instead of re-casting.

Netflix’s sequel series Fuller House is a triumph of canny calculation over creativity. The extended 40-minute premiere is the best fan-service of any reboot ever.

It turns out you can go home again--there’s just nothing new to see.

No one is ever going to say Fuller House is great TV, but as a nostalgia item, it will probably amuse its original, now grown, audience for an episode or two.

Appreciating Fuller House will depend a lot on how much you enjoyed the original, which ran eight seasons on ABC. The new show displays enough of its own personality to be a bit more than simply nostalgia. By the third episode--on which singer Macy Gray guests--it even starts to develop some loopy fun with a dance-off at a local club.

Fuller House is like a grilled cheese sandwich served with a cup of tomato soup. It’s not exactly amazing, but it’s certainly comforting.

It feels like just leaving the TV on as rerun after rerun piles up. The laugh lines are predictable. The gags play out exactly as you'd expect.

The first episode does a nice enough job juxtaposing scenes from the original with parallel scenes in the present, but enjoying Fuller House will require a high tolerance for laugh tracks and corny sitcom humor.

Besides exactly one scene in episode six between Sweetin and Cameron Bure, Fuller House also never hits its predecessor’s sweet spot between cloying sentiment, silly fun, and the set-a-timer inevitability of its structure. It feels like a forgery more than a new creation, with tiny details slipping through the cracks.

There is a nimbleness and familiarity to the way that Cameron-Bure, Sweetin and other members of the original cast work together, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with a show that celebrates the loyalty and solidarity that a family can share.... But Fuller House continually goes to the well of having cute kids mug for the camera as they practically yell their lines, and just a little of its self-congratulatory, blaring obviousness goes a long way.

Fuller House has nothing more to offer than a look at what an old show’s actors and format look like in the present day. It’s an utter failure of ambition in exactly the same way as was Fox’s recent X-Files reboot.

Fuller House begins as a sitcom family reunion. It becomes a self-conscious, dated and maudlin reminder of the ceaseless march of time and your inevitable demise.

While Fuller House is bad, it's endurable, and it works well when assessed on its own terms.

Fuller House is a dopey sitcom, but you can watch it with your entire family without offending anything but your intelligence.

Earnestness was Full House’s selling point, but Fuller House is too contrived to be sincere.

The episodes are predictable because they’re unoriginal and the writing is painful. The canned laughter is perhaps the greatest reminder of the “good old days.” If only all those recorded voices had something legitimate to laugh at.

It accomplishes what it sets out to do--be a bland family sitcom playing to a nostalgic audience. But that doesn't mean it's any good.

Fuller House is like the childhood friend who never grew up, who still lives at home, still hangs out at places frequented by teenagers, still makes the same dated pop-culture references. Visiting that person usually isn’t fun; it’s just sad.

There’s a plot, but it’s basically a series of entrances, exits, and signature bits designed to elicit roars from the studio audience. Even if you share the love, it’s just bad TV.

A series that confuses nostalgia with humor, terrible writing with throwback fun, and humiliation for “lesson learning” (this mostly falls to Kimmy, who really gets dragged through it).

Fuller House never justifies its own existence, let alone why the uninitiated should give it a chance.

There are so many self-satisfied references to the off-screen lives of the stars and what’s happened to them in the intervening years, you might sometimes think you’re watching a “Saturday Night Live” skit version of the show.

Netflix’s 13-episode revival of the old ABC sitcom “Full House” is less an update than an irony-free pantomime of the past.

Fuller House is a mawkish, grating, broadly played chip off the Full House block. It's doubtful that there will be a more painful 2016 TV episode than the Fuller House pilot, which takes an inexcusable 35 minutes to establish a plot that is just an inversion of the original Full House premise.