Did ‘Full House’ Predict Everything About Tech Disruption?

Having recently binge watched Fuller House, Netflix’s remake of the 1980s program Full House, I was mindlessly singing the theme song, and found myself paying special attention to the opening lines:

What ever happened to predictability

The milkman, the paperboy, evening tv?

A loyal viewer of TGIF as a child — ABC’s Friday lineup of family-friendly programming, which included Full House — I’d probably heard the ditty a thousand times leading up to the Netflix release and never thought too much about the lyrics. But now listening to this song as an adult, while residing in San Francisco and working in the technology industry, the truism of the words made me stop and think.

The series, both the original and its post-Millennium continuation, takes place in San Francisco. In fact, you can see the housefront that serves as the “home” of the Tanner family on Broderick Street. As home to a number of tech startups, San Francisco is also the hot zone for disruption. It’s the location most linked to the dismantling of predictable institutions that had long been a part of our lives. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that — rather prophetically — the three things mentioned in the song’s introduction directly relate to the parts of our lives most impacted by the onslaught of disruptive technologies.

1) The Milkman

At the time of Full House’s debut in 1987, the milkman was a long distant aspect of American life. Its mention at the start of the song seems to wax nostalgic on how we no longer depended on home delivery of consumer products, instead driving to local supermarkets to purchase food items.

It’s sort of ironic, then, that we’ve come full circle with the web 2.0 version of the milkman: home delivery of grocery items and, really, nearly anything that you could possibly desire. While this was something attempted in the web 1.0 days (though unsuccessfully, with the bankruptcy of Webvan), it’s now a highly competitive space with companies like Instacart and Postmates as well as heavy hitters Google and Amazon racing the clock (and each other) to quickly deliver consumables to tech-forward customers.

2) The Paperboy

I had to scratch my head when thinking through the disappearance of the paperboy. In the 1980s, newspapers were still a major source of news (as consumer internet was not widely available until the mid-1990s or so). The paper route, often the first job held by many an enterprising youngster, disappeared — but not at the hands of technology. Doing a bit of digging, it appears that the system shifted because of simple cost economics — that it made more sense to employ adults than it did to rely on underaged bicycle couriers. Thinking back to my childhood, I do recall that there was a point when my parents stopped referencing “the kid that delivers the newspaper” and that subsequent deliveries were prefaced by the sound of the motor and squealing brakes of the San Jose Mercury News van.

This memory is significant (at least to me) because in this web 2.0 world, the San Jose Mercury News, as well as many other news publications, no longer offers a print version. With the immediacy of news available (and therefore expected) via the internet — especially smartphones — readership was too low to justify a print version. In many regions, news is quickly distributed and consumed in digital format only. The idea of the paperboy delivering newspapers is now Americana and one, as wonderfully captured in this Buick Lacrosse commercial, that today’s youth struggle to comprehend, as all evidence has been virtually wiped clean.

3) Evening TV

Similar to news, the entertainment industry was deeply and irreversibly changed by the introduction of the internet. Prior to this shift, television programming was fixed to a certain day and time. (And without the internet, you had to check tv schedules in the TV Guide, a booklet that came with the Sunday newspaper — you know, the one that was delivered to your house, possibly by the paperboy.)

Programming was also limited in distribution to major networks, and for this reason, there were more “events”: must-see tv that everyone knew about in advance, watched in real time and then discussed at the watercooler the next morning. Who shot JR? What happened to Laura Palmer? Would Ross and Rachel end up together? These plotlines weighed heavily on the minds and in discussions of Americans for most of the 1980s and 1990s.

With the availability of faster internet and streaming video platforms, including YouTube, Netflix and Amazon, media and entertainment became asynchronous and consumption became more splintered. I wrote about this in a previous post, where I pointed out:

Proliferation of smartphones means that we no longer have to share communication or entertainment devices. Personalization of content means that we no longer share similar insights or points of interest. Fragmentation of media distribution means we are no longer tethered to content fixed in place (channel) or time.

Thinking about this last item — the “evening tv” — shifted my interpretation of the song and what it was trying to convey. At face value, the opening to the theme song is about the anchors that used to exist in our lives and that drove a cadence. We knew, with a certain certainty, what was to come. And these things were disappearing, lessening the predictability of life. And if we think about this in today’s terms, it’s particularly true. What had previously been delivered on a schedule is now almost all available at the customer’s beck and call.

However, I realized that all three things — the milkman, the paperboy, evening tv — also come together in a rueful commentary about how impersonal life’s activities had become by the late 1980s. It is a statement about the things that used to drive interaction and involvement with others, and that had been replaced with more efficient but also more sterile options. For example, “evening TV” is not solely about watching television programming at night; it’s a reference to the act of coming together and socializing, with the tv show serving as the unifying factor.

However, I realized that all three things — the milkman, the paperboy, evening tv — also come together in a rueful commentary about how impersonal life’s activities had become by the late 1980s.

I find this all very ironic, and a little bit eerie. While this idea isn’t surprising today, given the zombie-like society we have become with our reliance on smartphones, Full House ran from 1987 until 1995. In other words, the original series ended before Internet was widely available. So this means that the theme song was written, reminiscing about how impersonal life had become… at least a decade before the internet revolution had even started. And it talks about all the categories that would in three decades become the areas of our lives most impacted by disruptive technologies… especially here in San Francisco.

Is this all just coincidence? Was technological momentum already noticeable in the 1980s that it inspired critique from the songwriter? Is the Full House theme song a timeless statement about constant change in our lives? Or is it like some kind of creepy Mayan calendar, predicting disruptive technologies decades in the making?