Why Fuller House season 5 shouldn’t address Lori Loughlin headlines

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past few days, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard about the college bribery scandal involving Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman, and a number of other big names and wealthy individuals. People are facing serious charges, there are federal investigations, and also serious consequences likely coming on the other side. It’s dark, serious stuff — and while we know the impulse on social media is often to immediately fire away some jokes, for everyone involved this is hardly a laughing matter.

For the sake of this article we don’t want to zoom in on any charges, scandals, or consequences — that’s not what this is really about. Instead, we want to view this subject from a Fuller House perspective as we wonder what Loughlin’s arrest will do to impact the Netflix show.

Let’s kick things off here with a reminder that season 5 is still in pre-production, so no episodes have been filmed and there is plenty of time for elements to be tweaked and changed. Meanwhile, Loughlin is not even a series regular. The future may be a little more complicated for her other show in When Calls the Heart, and what comes next there could depend heavily on what happens within this investigation.

With Fuller House, we imagine the future is a tad more cut-and-dry — Lori Loughlin is not needed in order to make the show happen. Aunt Becky shows up here and there and that’s it. She may be an iconic part of the greater universe as established from Full House, but she is not the focus here. They haven’t focused in on Michelle at all, and she was arguably the most-famous kid character of the entire original show!

Now that we’ve established that the producers of Fuller House can virtually say/do whatever they want when it comes to the future of Becky, we then turn to this: How producers decide to address either the headlines or her potential absence, provided that she is not around? There are a few different things that they could do, including just write her off with a simple excuse (i.e. she’s off traveling somewhere), or they could try to do some sort of meta-joke about it (which we don’t want to see). They did this previously with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who decided not to do the revival and have been MIA for so long that it doesn’t even seem like the producers are really even bothering anymore. We still hold out the tiniest bit of hope for a cameo in the series, but that’s pretty much like us opening our front door to see a unicorn standing outside offering us a large pepperoni pizza and a cherry coke (a favorite around these parts!).

How Aunt Becky should be addressed

Come up with a simple excuse and then move on. The last thing that the writers should do is anything that tries to alter the reputation of who this character is. Just because Loughlin is accused of doing something terrible doesn’t mean that Becky should suffer. She should be the same funny character that she’s always been, even if she doesn’t appear on-screen. There are clearly enough other notable names within the Fuller House universe that you don’t need to put Becky under a magnifying glass in order for the show to work.

Another thing production shouldn’t do, even for a second, is consider a recasting — Fuller House is in its final season, so there’s no point in bringing someone else on board only to then say goodbye to them weeks later. A recast would also likely have an adverse effect — bringing someone in to try to move on from Loughlin would probably cause everyone to talk about her absence.

For more news on Fuller House, be sure to visit the link here and remember that the final season is going to be coming onto Netflix presumably later this year. Also, share in the comments what you think production should do in regards to Lori and Becky’s future. (Photo: Netflix.)