This complete loyalty to the source material—the same dewy lens, the same warm embraces and moral koan ending every episode, even the same affection for random dance sequences—is what makes Fuller House feel so strange and almost magical. Because you are waiting for the show to be somehow radically different. For there to be some break between 1995 and 2016 that feels jarring, some new world order. But no, the show stays, with few exceptions, exactly the same. Sure, the cast makes a few meta-jokes about Michelle’s whereabouts and John Stamos crows about how good everyone still looks, but after the old-timers leave, the show settles into the familiar rhythms that define every classic Full House episode, only this time with female leads. The references have been slightly modified—Stephanie plays Coachella, the kids have smartphones, there are jokes about Donald Trump and gluten—but the punchlines stay soft, and the plotlines always end with a grandiose speech about family bonding wrapped up with a bow. San Francisco has changed since 1995, but inside the Fuller House house, which must be worth about $25 million by now, things remain very much the same.

Silicon Valley has not invaded the Tanner household except to bring them to new fans via Netflix. Candace Cameron Bure, in a phone interview, tells me that changing the style of the show would doom it. “I don't think a spinoff would work if you changed the style. We've had such a loyal following for 30 years. The original Full House, it was panned the first couple of years. But it resonated with audiences. The fans who have been waiting for this show want what they are already expecting, if it went down a different path of trying to reinvent itself. This is a show that has not been off the air and there is a reason for it. Being on Netflix, we will come back simultaneously in all of these countries at once."

So far, the critics do not seem to understand the point of all this. They are lamenting the show as “self-obsessed,” and too enamored with its own mythology, as if Netflix let a Full House blogger write the entire TV show as fanfic. But what these critics fail to see is that those self-celebratory elements are what makes the Fuller House concept kind of genius. Fuller House is as unapologetic about itself as any undaunted millennial, as auto-referential as a selfie. The cast refuses to act embarrassed about the show’s retro tone, even when they are all doing the running man to “The Right Stuff.” Instead, this is a show that really feels itself. It feels that whatever magic it had back in 1987 (which critics bemoaned as trite pablum at the time as well, by the way), was a timeless, flawless formula. In that way, Fuller House exhibits an entitled swagger that feels extremely modern.

“No one has ever done this before,” Sweetin says of the truly loyal reboot. “We didn’t want to do a movie. We wanted to bring it back exactly as it was. I think if we tried to do some weird dark comedy version of Full House, people would be really disturbed by that. And the thing that I keep saying about Fuller House is that you can jump in and watch it as a standalone show. You don’t necessarily ever have to have seen the original to enjoy this as a really fun sitcom. We’re not relying only on people that have watched the show before.”