Nostalgic TV revivals usually happen because they’re a safe bet—it’s easy to drum up hype for a known quantity, especially when the original series has name recognition among pretty much anyone who was alive at the time it aired.

Netflix’s recent Full House update, Fuller House—with its insistent fan-baiting, the live studio audience, and its complete lack of irony—fits squarely into this model and signals a shift in Netflix’s domination strategy: instead of focusing only on producing original shows to appeal to viewers of premium television, the service is creating content to net all viewers, including those who don’t care about prestige TV. While Netflix still represents a new model for content delivery, that doesn’t mean that the original content it provides needs to be cutting edge as well.

Indeed, Netflix’s real innovation here is the conservatism implicit in Fuller House, communicated through the presence of outspoken religious conservative Candace Cameron Bure and, more significantly, through the show’s enthusiastic return to good old days of the sitcom. In keeping with its theme song, the series hews closely to “predictability,” updating the ‘90s world of Full House only as needed for temporal continuity; there are no references to Bob Saget’s more recent turn as a filthy comedian, not a single bite of the satire that contemporary San Francisco is ripe for.

Netflix’s more recent original The Ranch is another addition in the same category of content: it’s a multi-cam sitcom with a laugh track that relies on predictable beats and tidy wrap-ups. Though both Fuller House and The Ranch traffic in nostalgia for a certain era and style of family television, The Ranch more clearly illuminates how they both also reflect a yearning for a version of the American family that is rapidly exiting the cultural stage.

The Ranch’s most notable element is the way that it deals with its protagonists, the Bennett family, a (mostly) politically conservative, working class white family in rural Colorado whose cattle ranch has fallen on hard times. The Bennetts are representative of values-voting Americans, who have been disenfranchised by the country’s new social and political landscapes, and the show is culturally unique for not poking fun at them or painting their experience in broad strokes. There are so few explicitly politically conservative or working class characters on television that aren’t parodies or straw men that this representation feels nearly radical, revealing how deluded it is to think that most Americans can relate to or are reflected by the urban elites that are television’s default characters.

The series takes the Bennetts and their financial and emotional troubles seriously enough that it often feels more like a drama than a sitcom, and its willingness to engage with life’s bleaker themes is one of the show’s most redeeming qualities. Even if your taste is too refined to abide a laugh track, and even if the notion of an earnest multi-cam makes you wince, it’s difficult not to care about the family and the fate of their ranch as much as the show does. This is a significant display of cultural empathy, deployed in an unexpected direction.

Both Fuller House and The Ranch reflect a desire for comfort, something particularly aspirational in an election season characterized by cultural anxiety across the political aisle. There’s a bipartisan sense of political alienation among Americans, whose endorsed representatives seem hopelessly incompatible. With the rise of cultural conversations around issues of race and gender, and, in turn, the emphasis on content that is hyper-aware of these concerns, white working class and conservative Americans are feeling increasingly excluded by pop culture; by creating shows like Fuller House and The Ranch, Netflix is welcoming them back into the fold.

Christina McCausland is an assistant cultural analyst at TruthCo., an omnicultural branding and insights company that analyzes the current cultural landscape to deliver actionable recommendations that keep entertainment brands and their offerings relevant. Connect with TruthCo. at www.truthco.net or on Twitter @TeamTruthCo.


[Image of The Ranch courtesy of Netflix]

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