Yo. This is the Friday post. Here, we’ll answer the question that was posited in the Monday post, and possibly some others if I feel like it. If you like this and other posts from the newsletter, why not subscribe? If you have subscribed, why not share it?
QUESTION: Should Laura Winslow have married Steve Urkel or Stefan Urquelle on Family Matters?
A piece of clichéd writing advice that you may of heard is to “write what you know.”
Well, I’ve watched, and rewatched, and re-rewatched Family Matters far too many times to count, so I can honestly see why I felt compelled to write about it. In fact, when I first decided to start doing this newsletter thing, one of the first thoughts that popped in my head was, “I gotta talk about Urkel.” Sometimes it’s good to go with instinct.
In terms of impact, Steve Urkel is quite possibly the greatest sitcom character of all time. Besides the whole “being a cultural phenomenon” thing, this statement is also true because he single-handedly saved the show from cancellation and The Pitts-level obscurity when he first appeared halfway through the first season, because yoooo … Family Matters was not a very compelling watch for those first few episodes.
(Sidebar: Hit me up if you, like myself, are one of the five people that has seen The Pitts because you had nothing else better to do on a Sunday night after The Simpsons and Futurama except to watch whatever garbage the Fox network aired directly after them.)
(On that same note, shout out to Oliver Beene. And The War at Home, too.)
(I didn’t have a lot of friends back in the day, folks.)
Anyway. Think about it like this: Family Matters was a show about a Black family living in Chicago, and yet, it was blander than boxed instant mashed potatoes. I’m talking straight up Idahoan made with water. Steve Urkel was the seasoning needed to give the dish a little flavor, and America knew it. The show ended up running for nine seasons, spawned various crossover episodes with other TGIF shows like Full House and Step by Step, and inspired both a dance and my favorite Key & Peele skits of all time.
Jaleel White’s performance as Steve is easily the most important reason that the character was so popular, but the second most important reason is arguably the character’s long-standing infatuation with Laura Winslow – who, as you may know, was not into in him until the ninth season, when she suddenly realized that she was.
She ultimately said “no” to the marriage proposal of Steve’s suave dual personality-turned-real person Stefan Urquelle and F I N A L L Y said “yes” to the nerd.
Now, when I first saw this ending, it worked for me because it seemed right, right? Steve’s endless pursuit of the love of his life met its sweet end, and they all lived happily ever after with the bigger love of the faaaaaamillyyyyyy (cue piano riff).
Today, the feelings are a bit different. I’m in the middle of a ninth season rewatch of the show, and quite frankly, the development of the Steve-Laura romance feels a bit forced. A LOT forced, really. In fact, nothing in the last season really works for me. I don’t like how they disrespected and discarded Myra Monkhouse after she did nothing but love Steve and be hilarious. I wasn’t rocking with how they gave Little Richie the Judy treatment and vanished him before the end of the season without explanation.
I REALLY wasn’t here for the recasting Harriette with Judyann Elder after JoMarie Payton left the series. I would rather she had been written off in a tragic incident or some other wild excuse than have some imposter fill her shoes. But these are all conversations for another time, maybe in a second Family Matters-themed post.
Back to Urkel and Laura. I get that it was the final season, and they probably wanted to wrap up the show’s most enduring storyline as quickly and neatly as possible with the limited number of episodes that were left, but a part of me can’t shake the feeling that their relationship doesn’t work.
It feels like Laura just gave into the Urk-Man due to the fact that Stefan was too busy working to get his modeling career off the ground and Steve was in proximity.
Also, let’s be honest: A lot has changed since 1998, and it’s probably not as good of a look to reward a man who spent eight years pestering, emotionally manipulating, and sometimes just straight up tricking this woman into dating him. Like, if at first you don’t succeed, try again, but at some point YOU GOTTA STOP TRYING, MY DUDE.
In episode nine of the show’s fourth season, Steve is rejected by Laura for the 1,000th time. Instead of taking this as a hint that she’s not into him and moving on to greener pastures, he responds by climbing onto the Winslow’s roof (which he has already damaged multiple times) and vowed to stay there until Laura changed her mind and agreed to go out with him. Eventually she did agree to go out with him, but it obviously wasn’t because she wanted to. It was because this man was on her roof.
That’s not a cute anecdote you tell your kids about. That’s how news stories that end with a murder begin. So, no, Laura shouldn’t have ended up with Steve Urkel.
Let’s move on to Stefan. When Steve first invented his elixir that altered his DNA and turned him into Stefan, it also eradicated Steve’s kindness and made Stefan wildly arrogant and self-absorbed to the point that Laura wasn’t really feeling him whatsoever anymore and wanted him to transform back into Steve. Not a great start.
The next time around, Steve ironed out the kinks in the transformation process and Stefan was a lot easier to be around, which only made it easier for Laura to fall for him. Things are good between them until, as I mentioned earlier, Stefan starts to take on a modeling career after he becomes a permanent human being.
He wasn’t around as much, and while it’s obvious that he was in love with Laura, he’s also in love with his new jet-setting lifestyle. He didn’t have the capacity for both.
I’m not going to knock someone for wanting to put their eggs in the basket career-wise, but Stefan should have been smart enough to realize that the international long-distance dating situation wasn’t going to work out. It barely works out on 90 Day Fiancê, so I fail to see how it would have been any better in this instance – especially since the technology wasn’t even remotely the same.
Also, this is a petty thing, but Jaleel White was the voice of Sonic the Hedgehog on TV for years while he was doing Family Matters. His normal speaking voice is basically just his Sonic voice, and honestly, any time he appeared as Stefan, it just sounded too much as if Sonic was out here trying to spit game. “Hey sweet thing, GOTTA GO FAST.”
Simply put. I don’t like that. I’m not mad that Laura passed up on his proposal.
ANSWER: Laura Winslow shouldn’t have married either of these dudes.
She should have just pulled a Kelly Taylor and chose herself, because anything is better than than shacking up with a borderline deviant and a dude who just ain’t there.