Bob Saget Replaced John Posey in Full House Pilot
bob saget almost did not play Danny Tanner in Full House. He was unavailable when the sitcom first cast the role, and John Posey had already been hired for the unaired pilot.
That changed after Saget was let go from CBS's The Morning Program, and the show recast Danny before the series launched in September 1987. The switch sent the production back into pilot reshoots that creator Jeff Franklin said cost almost a million dollars.
Jeff Franklin's first choice
Jeff Franklin said he had always initially wanted Saget for the part, and that he organized a secret chemistry test with Dave Coulier and John Stamos on the set of Perfect Strangers. In his view, the cast was already working, but adding Saget gave the show the right center of gravity for a family sitcom that would run for 8 seasons through May 1995.
“[Posey] was great, but he's not a comedian, you know, he was an actor, and you know this is a comedy, and you want the three funniest guys you can get, and that cast was so magic and I just thought if we could just get Bob in there, it would just be....it would put us over the top,” Franklin said on Dave's podcast Full House Rewind in July 2025. He also said, “I just had this gut instinct, from the beginning, that Bob could be one of those classic TV dads,” a line that fits the role the series ended up building around.
The July 2021 switch
In July 2021, Saget explained why he nearly missed the job. “Then I got fired from The Morning Program, and they wanted me still for Full House. So I took the job, and it meant everything. It was a sitcom, it was on ABC, it was a family show. They were reshooting my stuff from the pilot because I replaced someone [John], which is always sad. I always feel guilt about it, but that’s life,” he said. That kind of reset is expensive, and in this case it meant reworking the first version of a show that would become one of ABC's defining family comedies.
Saget was more than the man in the center seat. He also worked as the show's audience warm-up comedian and later made a guest appearance in the first season, which makes the casting story feel less like trivia and more like the origin point of the show's entire tone.
May 17 and January 2022
Saget would have turned 70 on May 17, after being found dead in January 2022. His death was later reported as blunt head trauma that likely happened from an unwitnessed fall, a reminder that the man who became Danny Tanner only reached the role after an odd, costly chain of events.
For viewers revisiting Full House, the practical takeaway is simple: the Danny Tanner people remember was not the first Danny Tanner on set. The unaired-pilot swap, the almost million-dollar reshoot, and Saget's late arrival explain why the character ended up sounding like a comedian instead of just a straight dramatic dad.
