How I Met Your Mother: 10 Episodes Proving It’s Past Its Best

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Earlier this week, I wrote in a previous article that How I Met Your Mother has officially jumped the shark with its slow-paced and somewhat convoluted final season. Knowing for certain the identity of the mother (or at least the woman) is definitely a nice change of pace, but the idea of the final season taking place over the course of a single weekend, no matter how many episodic flashbacks we see, just isn’t the same. Without the gang in their coveted booth at MacLaren’s Irish Pub in New York City on a weekly basis, the show has lost the bromantic and often unorthodox comedy we all held near and dear for the better part of a decade.

This piece will be hard to get through because How I Met Your Mother is arguably my favorite sitcom since Seinfeld (if you don’t count Fox’s Titus, which was criminally cancelled in its third season) and has often, along with a few of its network competitors, been called the Friends of the 21st century. Unfortunately though, the shark wasn’t necessarily jumped nor was the fridge necessarily nuked with the longest wedding weekend in history, as the show’s newest tagline states, but rather has been plagued by divulging story lines with shock value for a while now. This isn’t necessarily to say that How I Met Your Mother is now bad; with a couple of exceptions few and far between and while this season has been hit or miss, it has a pretty good batting average as far as laughs go no matter how ridiculous some plots may be, and still manages to be one of CBS’ highest rated shows as we approach its 31 March finale.

There are those episodes which prove to us that the hit sitcom’s best days are behind rather than ahead and we have compiled a list of ten prime examples, and not all of them from season 9. Some of them are great but remind us of days of yore, others are decent but contain over-the-top plot devices and bizarre storytelling, and a couple are borderline unwatchable and are just digging for Carter Bays’ and Craig Thomas’ table scraps. In chronological order, we start with number 10 after the jump. As always, beware any potential spoilers if you’re behind on the show.

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