She killed off the Tanner family three years ago, but Katie Johnston-Smith, of Wicker Park, is hoping to be a part of bringing them back to the small screen.
Johnston-Smith, 28, co-wrote a dark comedic play about the “Full House” family that she performed at the Gorilla Tango Theatre in Bucktown for five months in 2012.
The hourlong drama blended the popular ’90s family sitcom with the musical “Sweeney Todd,” portraying patriarch Danny Tanner (Bob Saget) as a serial killer, in direct contrast with the wholesome image he built as a San Francisco morning TV show host.
Now Johnston-Smith (who also played daughter D.J. Tanner in the play), is campaigning to parlay her obsession with “Full House” into a job writing for the upcoming spin-off. Netflix announced this week it is picking up 13 episodes of “Fuller House.” The revival, due in 2016, will focus on Candace Cameron Bure, who plays D.J. Tanner-Fuller, now a recently widowed mom who looks to her sister Stephanie (played by Jodie Sweetin) and friend Kimmy Gibbler (played by Andrea Barber) to help her raise her children.
“The world needed this,” Johnston-Smith said about the spin-off. “I have always loved ‘Full House.'”
Since the spin-off announcement, many who grew up watching “Full House,” Millenials in particular, have taken to social media to express excitement about the return of the Tanner family. But the news held special interest in what’s next for the sitcom’s characters for show obsessives such as Johnston-Smith and Ryan Alexander-Tanner.
From 2010-2014, Alexander-Tanner watched one “Full House” episode per week for his satire site “Full House Reviewed.” Alexander-Tanner, 32, said it took him three to four hours to review each 30-minute episode as he gathered screen grabs for his blog and rewrote one-liners to mock the series, which went off the air in 1995 after an eight-season, 192-episode run.
“I finished (the series) and I was like, ‘Phew,'” Alexander-Tanner said, “There is kind of a funny element at this moment where it’s like, ‘There’s more? God dammit.'”
Alexander-Tanner, a Portland cartoonist who used to live in Hyde Park, said he got into hate-watching the show after working on a book with Bill Ayers, a controversial former professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Alexander-Tanner said the book project was intense and he was looking for a less-stressful hobby in 2010.
He said he considered writing reviews of “Family Matters,” a TV show about a Chicago cop and his family, but the show was not yet out on DVD. So he turned his attention to “Full House,” a show he had seen growing up but never really liked.
“It’s so bad, and it’s really bad in this really particular way. I think the anger it incites in you, as a viewer, is addictive,” Alexander-Tanner said. “It’s baffling that something of that quality is so successful.”
Alexander-Tanner said he found the show to be about the advantages of rich, white people. He said he particularly disliked the Joey Gladstone character, a Tanner family friend played by Dave Coulier, because he was supposed to be a comedian but Alexander-Tanner didn’t find him funny or likeable.
Alexander-Tanner said he found that other viewers shared the same opinion. He said his site has received 3 million visits since he first began posting in 2010. He’s hoping to get paid to review “Fuller House” when it is released next year.
Halfway through the series, Alexander-Tanner said he found himself fatigued watching episodes of a show he loathed, but his community of readers inspired him to keep going with the project.
Alexander-Tanner, who currently appears on a podcast about “Saved the Bell,” a similarly beloved ’90s sitcom, said he will appreciate “Fuller House” if the series tackles the reality of alternative families, a topic he said the original “Full House,” never covered.
He said he is also looking forward of the return of Gibbler, D.J. Tanner’s teenage sidekick, who was known for wearing outrageous outfits and sometimes doing the wrong thing.
“She’s the only interesting character. She’s sort of this odd eccentric who is mistreated,” Alexander-Tanner said. “She doesn’t fit in with all of them, and that makes her more likeable.”
Johnston-Smith also recalled adoring the bubbly Gibbler. In fact, Gibbler was the only character to survive the Tanner bloodbath in the Gorilla Tango performance
Over the next few weeks, Johnston-Smith said she and her writing partner, Meghan Lloyd, a former Chicagoan who now lives in Los Angeles, plan to create a campaign to become writers on “Fuller House.”
The two plan to create a Tumblr account to post Lloyd’s “Full House” fan fiction about what the characters are up to now (including sex scenes that they now plan to tone down) and stress their obsession with the show, Johnston-Smith said.
“I absolutely loved it. It’s one of those shows now that’s like going home. I can put it on and I know pretty much know every plot line,” Johnston-Smith said. “Growing up, it was a really nice, wholesome, kind-of easy show for me to watch with my brothers and my parents.”
