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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: June 13, 1986
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: There is no more embarrassing mass-cultural event than a people going ga-ga over a child. Maybe a pet? But doesn’t it feel like the people who were ride-or-die for Grumpy Cat or Uggie from The Artist are much more unapologetic about it? No, it’s the worship of child stars that really gets us embarrassed. From Webster to Arnold to Malcolm in the Middle, culture tends to go nuts for them and then really overcompensate when they decide they’re over it. Which brings us to the Olsen twins, one of the strangest cultural phenomena of the 1990s. Not so much that they got a lot of attention on Full House — Michelle Tanner was a cute kid with a seemingly bottomless barrel of one-liners; of course that was going to succeed — but that Mary-Kate and Ashley would have built such a massive ancillary empire around themselves.
The Olsen Twins were a brand well before it was declared that everybody needed to have a brand. They had a multi-millionaire home-video empire. They were merchandized out to Jesus. They broke into the movies. They got Steve Guttenberg and Kirstie Alley to fall in love with each other (on-screen, but still). At some point, “the Olsen Twins” became a punch line, as the people who’d loved her aged out of that particular demographic. This coincided with the Olsens emerging as kind of weirdo fashion plates and fixtures in the famous-for-being-famous ecosystem that Paris Hilton and her contemporaries had fostered in the 2000s.
Which isn’t to say that bag-lady-chic Mary-Kate didn’t give the culture a lot. Once again, I point any and all of you to Beastly, a movie that casts Mary-Kate Olsen as a witch mostly because it’s really easy to imagine Mary-Kate Olsen as a witch.
Now if they’d only show up on Fuller House.
