Key Takeaways
- Jaleel White says he misses the energy and creative freedom of performing Family Matters in front of a live studio audience.
- White believes social media’s constant scrutiny makes old-school sitcom logic harder to pull off today, joking that modern viewers would call Steve Urkel’s uninvited visits to the Winslows “stalking.”
- He is revisiting the decade on HGTV’s Totally ’90s House, a renovation competition featuring Melissa Joan Hart, Jodie Sweetin, Keshia Knight Pulliam, and other ’90s stars.
Jaleel White knows plenty of things from the ’90s are better left there. But when it comes to Family Matters, there’s one piece of the era he’d gladly bring back: the live studio audience.
While promoting HGTV’s Totally ’90s House, White reflected on the energy that came with performing sitcoms in front of a real crowd—and why he doesn’t think that experience translates so easily to modern television. “I definitely miss a good live studio audience,” White told USA Today, adding that his current game show Flip Side gives him at least a taste of it.
Sitcoms, though? He’s far less convinced.
Part of the problem, according to White, is that today’s audiences interrogate sitcom logic. He used Steve Urkel’s habit of constantly appearing at the Winslow home as the perfect example of something viewers accepted in the ’90s that would almost certainly get picked apart now.
“Why does that boy keep coming over to that house uninvited? That’s stalking,” White imagined commenters saying.
His response summed up just how much the culture has shifted: “Like what? We didn’t see it that way at all.”
White would know better than most how much television has changed. Steve Urkel was initially intended as a one-time character on Family Matters before exploding in popularity and becoming central to the series.
White ultimately played Urkel, Stefan Urquelle, and Myrtle Urkel, helping turn the show into one of ABC’s defining TGIF sitcoms and one of the longest-running comedies with a predominantly Black cast.
The actor doesn’t necessarily believe viewers in the ’90s were less sensitive or less critical. They simply didn’t have a comment section attached to every episode. “I have to assume even back then that people may have felt some kind of way when they heard certain things because they were triggered,” White said, “but they didn’t have the channels to leave comments and send emails and tweet.”
That constant real-time feedback loop, in his view, makes the old-school sitcom ecosystem harder to recreate.
Ironically, White is currently getting paid to dive straight back into the decade. HGTV’s Totally ’90s House puts him at the center of a renovation competition featuring Melissa Joan Hart, Jodie Sweetin, Keshia Knight Pulliam, Brian Austin Green, Matthew Lawrence, Beverley Mitchell and Joey Lawrence.
The cast tackles homes still loaded with unmistakably ’90s design choices—from massive entertainment centers and bathroom carpeting to rooms covered in mirrors—and decides which pieces can be modernized without stripping away the nostalgia.
White also remembers the actual sets of that era as looser places to work. Recalling his famous Full House crossover, he said he spent the week bouncing between soundstages and “just messing around with John Stamos.”
“We were really encouraged to play back then,” he said.
