For many TV viewers — at least those in San Francisco — “Full House” was the defining family sitcom of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Running from 1987 to 1995, the show starred Bob Saget as Danny Tanner, a TV news anchor raising a family after his wife passed away. The ensemble cast included other notable stars like Lori Loughlin and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. John Stamos played a prominent role as Uncle Jesse Katsopolis, a musician whose character’s history turned out to have at least one serious inconsistency.
On November 4, Paul Ramsdell, a New York-based TV producer, released a YouTube video titled “House Full of Lies.” It delves deep into a specific plot point that Ramsdell has obsessed over since childhood, when he’d spend afternoons rewatching the show in his basement after moving to a new town.
“Every day, there was this magical hour between school and homework, where I would get to spend two marvelous episodes in San Francisco with the Tanners,” he narrates at the start of the 11-minute video. The project was based on a slideshow he presented at a pandemic PowerPoint party thrown by a friend in January 2021. He told SFGATE that the video took 80 hours to produce.
The specific plot point in question revolves around Uncle Jesse’s educational background. In the ninth episode of the fourth season, which aired in November 1990, Uncle Jesse practices a few songs to play with his old band at his 10-year high school reunion. A flashback shows him riding a motorcycle into the school gym and joking about how he couldn’t be expelled a day before graduation. Two seasons later, in the episode “Educating Jesse,” he admits to the rest of the family that he was a high school dropout, seemingly contradicting the episode that had aired two years earlier.
Rather than just settle for pointing out the inconsistency, Ramsdell took it a step further, contacting the show’s writer, Tom Burkhard. To Ramsdell’s surprise, Burkhard not only wrote him back but knew about this exact plot hole, which a script assistant pointed out during filming but considered too insignificant to correct.
“[Tom] was so happy to help. He thought it was funny… That he was down to talk to me, and that he remembered, and so specifically, I was out-of-my-mind happy. I was like, ‘no way, this is the jackpot,'” Ramsdell said in a phone interview.
In the five days since posting the video, it has gone viral with 114,000 views, and an associated Reddit post has 11,000 upvotes and 1,100 comments. Ramsdell noticed that the comments fall into three different camps: positive responses, critical ones pointing out the possibility that Uncle Jesse was indeed expelled for the motorcycle stunt and people simply asking what the hell a PowerPoint party is.
“There is another longer cut when I went into deeper explanation about what happened in ‘Educating Jesse’ that completely obliterates any chance that he could’ve got expelled for the motorcycle,” Ramsdell said.
Although the video has a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theorist-style outrage, Ramsdell sees it more as a tribute to the show.
“The whole point is that it’s supposed to be stupid. Everyone knows with ’90s sitcoms, you aren’t in it for the plot; you’re in it for the feel-good television…
“It was very much a love letter to TV. I think we all grew up watching TV, and it does very much end up becoming like your family to an extent. That show was escapism of course, but it helped me through a really hard time in my life, and I wanted to say thanks. And miraculously, I am a part of it now, which feels amazing.”
