View Full Version : How much creative control/input did Jeff Franklin really have


TMC
04-08-2015, 03:32 AM
https://therealfullhousereviewed.wordpress.com/

The story of how Full House came to be seems pretty simple, as near as I can tell. Jeff Franklin (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0291449/), the guy who made “Summer School” and “Just One of the Guys,” two moderately entertaining movies that were on TV an awful lot when I was growing up, got a shot at creating a TV series. He pitched a show about 3 comedians who all lived together and it got retooled into a series that was more or less a rip-off of the movie “3 Men and a Baby.” The network was interested in preachy, moralistic, family-friendly programming at the time and that gradually overrode Franklin’s more raunchy and subversive tendencies as a creator. As the show became successful it started to rely more and more heavily on its established conventions, including terrible catch-phrases and socially tactless characters, and that’s pretty much all there is to it.

Reading this, I get the feeling that Jeff Franklin wanted to do a more edgy, adult, bawdy (or what was considered "bawdy" on TV back in the '80s) type of sitcom (the working title was House of Comics (https://books.google.com/books?id=w7m1-OOvTu8C&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=house+of+comics+jeff+franklin&source=bl&ots=qvDPbkdv5j&sig=Qt7zWuXg4OEw9C9VeppkOkdAzlA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wdkkVYH9EImpogS57YCwAw&ved=0CE0Q6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=house%20of%20comics%20jeff%20franklin&f=false)), but ABC wanted to do a family sitcom (since they were all of the rage at the time thanks to The Cosby Show (http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/06/full-house-facts/) and to a lesser extent, Family Ties and ABC's own Growing Pains). Also what I would perceived to have been Jeff Franklin's original vision, but was further watered down by the Miller-Boyett (http://articles.latimes.com/1990-01-14/entertainment/ca-408_1_tom-miller) shlock factory (http://www.macleans.ca/authors/jaime-weinman/the-20th-anniversary-of-the-most-awesomest-tv-contract-dispute-ever/).

TMC
05-01-2015, 01:02 AM
After Jeff Franklin, left to go work on Hangin' Out With Mr. Cooper, Full House basically degenerated into "The Michelle Show" and relied too much on tired gags (e.g. animals like the pig, and the horse that Michelle bought).