I broke my arm four years ago. Surgery was required for the spiral fracture of my humerus, and so weeks were spent in a clunky cast with some mighty powerful pain meds keeping me afloat. My nights were mostly sleepless, but I wasn’t tired. It was as though these extra hours in the day were unlocked – as if the universe saw I needed the gift of time to change the direction of my life.

And so, I watched every single episode of Full House.

I’d seen plenty of the show growing up, but that was many years and one fully functioning arm ago. There it was on Netflix, and there I was wide awake. And so, I injected all 192 episodes into me, night after night, until the bitter end.

A lot of that time was spent with my eyes closed in a semi-lucid state. Which means much of my memories of the show are simply voices, sounds, and music, set to the backdrop of painkiller-fuelled images interwoven with the dark abyss that is the night. However, since then, I’ve watched plenty of Full House with eyes open, and the experience is more or less the same.

To this day, when I wake up in the middle of the night and cannot fall back asleep, the only thing that’ll do the trick is firing up Netflix on my phone and playing this relic of a sitcom. White noise and meditation have nothing on Danny’s eerily flat delivery and Joey’s limp impressions.

Actually, this is really the Uncle Jesse Show. He’s the only one with anything resembling a character arc. Danny and Joey are in more or less the same spot after eight years. Meanwhile, Jesse the wild womanizing musician moves in to help his brother-in-law and nieces, tames his ways, and finds something resembling love with Becky.

Jesse runs a gambit of undeserved jobs that fall into his lap, from advertising to radio to nightclub owner. This includes inexplicably inheriting a nightclub. No article or study on privilege is as enlightening as the arc the writers created for this man. If that wasn’t enough, he adds to the overly-populated house with twins and finally has to do some actual parenting, after avoiding it for five whole seasons despite that being the very premise of the show.

As for Danny and Joey, they are supposedly best friends. But we only know that because Danny won’t stop saying it. Otherwise, the two of them never really hang out and the bulk of the show is Joey and Jesse doing best friend-y things as they fail upwards together in life.

We follow these men in a haze of poor writing and low quality for seven years, until an even lower level of quality, previously inaccessible to humankind, is unlocked in the final season. In this transcendent state, we are subjected to a parade of random guest stars and lazy plots:

Kareem-Abdul Jabbar teaches Jesse basketball! (What?)
DJ puts her principal’s car on the school’s roof as a prank! (How?)
Michelle and Jesse are held hostage by Mickey Rooney on Christmas Eve in a gag gift shop! (…why?)

Full House ends with a whimper of a two-parter in which Michelle loses and regains her memory. The moral of the story and the series as a whole: Unless you’re Uncle Jesse, nothing changes.

But perhaps the greatest absurdity of all is that I consumed these 192 episodes, deprived myself of much-needed sleep, and regret nothing. Like the rod and screws in my arm, Full House is now forever a part of me. From the cruel luck of privilege, to this planet still spinning despite gross ineptitude, I see Full House. Everywhere I look.