How Come the ‘Full House’ Kids Never Talked About Their Dead Mom?
The entire premise of Full House is based on the kids’ mom dying. When Pam Tanner, mother to DJ, Stephanie and Michelle, is killed in a car accident, Danny Tanner enlists the help of his brother-in-law Jesse and best pal Joey to help him raise the girls. Baby Michelle would be too young to remember Mom, but what about DJ (10 years old!) and Stephanie (5)? You’d think the subject of their missing mom would come up once in a while, right?
Turns out Dead Mom Amnesia is a common complaint among Full House fans. Andrea Barber and Jodie Sweetin, who played Kimmy Gibbler and Stephanie Tanner on the show, say ignoring dead mothers doesn’t make sense to them either on a recent episode of their podcast, How Rude, Tanneritos!
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Pam Tanner gets a brief mention during Season One, the costars point out. It’s a home-movie flashback in which Mom (Christie Mossman) comes home from the hospital with baby Michelle. Seeing Mom again doesn’t seem to trigger much emotion in Steph and Deej except for sentimental grins. Don’t we look just like the mother we barely knew? And that’s about the last Full House viewers hear of Pam.
She didn’t have a ghost of a chance. Even in all the family photos hanging around the house, Mom is nowhere to be found. There’s a picture of Stephanie and Danny on the girl’s nightstand — but no Pam.
The slight had an easy fix, argued Sweetin. Just mention her once in a while? “It doesn’t need to be morbid or down,” she explained. “It would happen naturally over time when you can tell stories about somebody that are funny. I would have loved to have heard more stories about Pam with the kids or something she did with Danny. Because that’s kind of what you do when someone passes. You keep them alive with the stories.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t have to be sappy with the violins and crying,” Barber agreed. “You could just have a casual mention in these later seasons.”
Pam never got those stories or mentions, Sweetin noted. “It was like, ‘You’re dead, bye.’ You know?”
“Pam was kind of erased by Season Four,” Barber said.
“By Season Four? By Episode Four!” Sweetin replied. “They were like, just wipe her name off. Bye.”
The only reason to cut Full House writers some slack? Never mentioning dead spouses is practically a sitcom trope. At least Pam Tanner had a name. Andy Taylor’s dead wife on The Andy Griffith Show was barely mentioned. Did Mike and Carol Brady kill off their respective spouses so they could start a blended family on The Brady Bunch? The producers never told us. My Three Sons, The Beverly Hillbillies and Diff’rent Strokes all had dead, no-name moms lurking in the backstory, too.
So enjoy your VHS flashback, Pam Tanner. It’s more than most dead sitcom moms got.
