How I Met Your Mother Boned the Fish When...

[TMC]

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JUMP THE SHARK

Dopplegangers (5x24)

This is not a particularly bad episode, but it was the first time that one of the shows running gags felt stale. In the episode, it brings up the idea that if Marshall and Lilly see a doppleganger of someone in their group then they will decide to have a baby. The main problem is that the end of this season felt so much like treading water. As they years dragged on, we wanted the journey to find its destination. But this felt like the upcoming seasons would be a lot of waiting around until the main storyline pushed forward. And that was true for the next 2 years.

[MrCleveland]

I was donating plasma yesterday and on FX, they had "How I Met Your Mother". My brother and his girlfriend once told me "Try it, you'll like it".

I hated the show then, hated the show now. It's just "Seinfeld" meets "Friends" without the humor.

And DON'T get me started with Barney Stinson!

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The History:

Carter Bays ( The Late Show with David Letterman) and Craig Thomas ( Oliver Beene) were screenwriters and friends for years. Having had many misadventures in New York and realizing that writing what you know is generally a safe way to create something of substance, Bays and Thomas collaborated to adapt their lives into what would become How I Met Your Mother (or HIMYM). Taking some ideas from real life, some from The Wonder Years and even a little inspiration from the works of Joss Whedon, the show was pitched to CBS and premiered in September of 2005. The show would go on to last nine seasons and 208 episodes, Pamela Fryman ( Just Shoot Me!) notably directing 196 episodes. While never dropping below #70 in the TV rankings for a season How I Met Your Mother was never a true ratings giant, the seasonal average typically between 8 and 10 million viewers. Despite this How I Met Your Mother was nominated for several Emmy Awards (winning nine out of twenty-eight) and in its final season averaged more than ten million viewers an episode, generally unprecedented since typically shows lose viewers over time ( Breaking Bad is one of the few shows in recent memory to replicate this feat).

The Show:

In the year 2030 architect Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor, voiced in the future by Bob Saget) sits down his teenage children to tell them the story about how he met their mother (title drop). In the past the audience gets to see the misadventures of a group of 20 and later 30-somethings living in New York: Ted, his friend Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), Marshall's wife Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan), womanizer Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) and news anchor Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders). The tale starts with Ted meeting and being smitten with Robin, who joins his circle of friends, as well as Marshall and Lily getting engaged. The long and complicated journey then begins to showing how Ted would eventually meet 'the Mother', Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti), with plenty of flashbacks, flashforwards and narrative devices employed (remember, this is all being told as one long-winded story like something out of Tristram Shandy.

The Good:

You'd think after smash-hits like Friends and Seinfeld the idea of a group of friends living in New York would be pretty much done, at least for a while. First and foremost, no, we're apparently not, though perhaps a main reason the show felt fresh at all was the framing device. How I Met Your Mother bravely mashed up the concept of Friends with the narrative device of The Wonder Years while actually being set in the future. Still, that's just the basic way to pitch it to someone who has never seen it before. The better expansion of how it can feel unique outside of talking about the jokes, memorable episodes or characters is how well the show's narrative device is implemented. Rapid cuts, humorous insights, freedom to utilize cutaway gags that are fantasy or a flashback/flashforward are all good, but that's also a bit Scrubs, isn't it? I mean a show being a mash-up of three pretty good shows (I admittedly wasn't a huge Friends fan but hey, it was popular) is still alright... Then you get into the fact that, since its all the visualization of a story, even the events of the show itself can end up with hilarious twists. Just as a couple of examples (I think both from Season 3 actually), at one point Ted is dating a girl only ever known as 'Blah Blah' because he can't remember her name in 2030, and another example is an older man Robin was dating being shown to be much older than he probably actually was. These gags could last single episodes are go longer (I believe both examples last at least three), and that said lets digress into the humour a bit more... To ignore how well Neil Patrick Harris has aged.

So on the subject of the show's humour and in general the kind of brain at work here, it's definitely modern. As television and other mediums have progressed rapid cuts and the like have become more important, and How I Met Your Mother wields the rapid cutting of 21st Century sitcoms like a 9th generation sword-master. Rapid cutting can be obnoxious if overused, but thankfully How I Met Your Mother doesn't go too schizophrenic (think Quantum of Solace), cutting fast enough to get to jokes before the audience can fully predict them while at the same time letting slower scenes play out. Running gags were also legen... Wait for it... You're not waiting for it... dary! Not every joke was necessarily great to start out (indeed some frequent catch-phrases sound kind of stupid at first, though that's how running gags tend to work), but over time many events and innocent little devices could pop up. That brings me to my last point...

The show has fantastic continuity. This extends beyond simply having random love interests from certain episodes return too. Perhaps one of the most well-known bits from the show is Slap Bet, a season two episode (probably one of the best in the show's run too), which introduced the fact that Robin had secretly been a pop star back around 1990 or so in Canada when she was known as Robin Sparkles (A character I loathe but hey, some people liked her), and a bet that promised Marshall the ability to slap Barney five times without consequence, from there to eternity. As I said I don't care for Sparkles (or most of the jokes about Canada really as they felt really phoned in for a show I expected better of), but this didn't just become some random part of Robin's past, it greatly informed how she became who she was, and the show took full advantage of this. The Slap Bet also became a lingering element throughout the rest of the show, and really set up how seemingly random plot elements could last years. The show even pulled a more innocuous one when it managed to foreshadow the death of Marshall's father in Bad News (another pretty good episode) when in earlier flashbacks during the show's run we saw in the future his dad was innocuously absent. It was clever elements like this that could reward viewers for rewatching episodes and hanging on every word, no matter whose line it is anyway.

The Bad:

I was seriously tempted to list all the stupid Canadian jokes, but I think I've got enough legit stuff to rant about. For how funny and well-crafted the show was, the characters kind of suck, though Ted and Lily are by and far the worst offenders. Barney can be a fairly terrible human being, it's true, being a generally unrepentant womanizer who casually talks about banging chicks while using those exact words. Barney, however, grew, confronting his father and generally trying to change as a person when he entered into serious relationships. This was annoyingly forgotten at points, as even in Season 8 (yes, the second last season), Barney was talking about banging chicks like a sixteen-year-old boy *********, and what could have been a big romantic gesture on his part ended up being fairly creepy (I am referring to 'The Robin' from Season 8). It's a shame really because Barney was effectively the character who needed to and did evolve the most, yet he kept being reset and it hindered his growth. Marshall was generally a great best friend character but despite going through some serious traumas ( Bad News again comes to mind) the character almost seemed to become worse over time, ending up a bit more spineless, which was a shame. As for Robin, she in many ways became a female Barney after being fairly bland for the first season (it has to suck playing a token love interest), going from the least likeable character to probably the most, yet she also seemed to regress at points. People can naturally regress, yes, but in this case the regression felt so abrupt it was like someone adjusted their personalities with an eraser rather than seeing the people change.

So I mentioned I hate Ted and Lily, and I stick by this. It's annoying too because in Season 1 I liked both characters fine. I have gone on record not liking Josh Radnor of course, but Lily... Well, let me put it this way: she's a bitch. Pure and simple. Lily is a terrible person whose manipulation of the group dynamic around her is terrible and despite how often the show and she herself would constantly go out of their way to make Lily seem like she's a good person, she's really not. Marshall gets turned into a doormat and is constantly berated when nothing he did was ever as bad as stuff she did like randomly leaving him at the altar or messing with Ted's love life to a level even the Strangers from Dark City would find messed up. Ted meanwhile seems to think he's the protagonist in a romantic comedy film (being an architect, we can probably forgive this of him). The problem is, Ted has the worst qualities of male leads from romantic comedies where women are the protagonists, and instead of being insufferable for two hours max, he was insufferable for nine damn years. Between ruining something like three marriages/potential marriages (including one of his own) and learning every wrong lesson from the episode The Double Date (instead of realizing he's an ******* he decides he's perfect) Ted is the worst. Pure and simple. But that isn't so bad when the show created Tracy McConnell, the rom-com perfect love interest Ted was apparently waiting nearly a decade to meet.

So the finale managed to mess everything up, but I'm not talking about the finale episode itself per say. Now, let me make something perfectly clear: stupid regressions where Ted and Robin bang or thing about hooking back up again wouldn't be been planted long after they stopped dating if there wasn't a point, and the show started with Ted meeting Robin. Obvious twist with Ted somehow meeting the Mother yet still managing to get with Robin was coming a mile away. Now, the show could have been clever and not gone that way after the show lasted nine damn seasons (and nine years after jokes about the new female guest star being 'The Mother' stopped being funny), making it perhaps Ted trying to explain to his kids exactly why Robin became 'Aunt Robin' as she clearly meant a lot to him after all this time. Instead we get full season dedicated to Barney and Robin getting married, and a supposedly pivotal episode where Ted 'lets Robin go', only to ruin it all in the two-part finale. A marriage built up for over a season was destroyed in a few short minutes (would haven't been so bad if it was just like a one-hour episode wedding rather than a full season), and this was a romance that had started as early as Season 3 (when Barney and Robin fist hooked up). A meeting built-up almost a decade was soon crushed when Tracy, whom the audience had slowly fallen in love with over the course of the season ( How Your Mother Met Me even making all the pieces of the puzzle fit together perfectly in what was a season and show's final high), died off-screen of Dramatically Convenient Death Syndrome. Then it became clear Ted was telling the story as a way to explain to his kids why he wanted to go ask Robin out one more time. Unfortunately this in turn is a really creepy way to give the apparently eternal love that Ted and Robin one more shot (when arguably a big charm of the show was that their will-they-won't-they relationship was a big WON'T from the pilot episode), as it can easily come off as Ted trying to manipulate his kids into cleansing any potential feelings of guilt about going there. Indeed, even in the end, Ted is a self-serving jackass, and he gets the happy ending rather than Barney, the guy who actually tried to change and become a better human being. How I Met You Mother ends with the villain winning.

The Blame:

The writers. I can't stress enough that the writers are funny, funny people. However, that said, the lack of self-awareness was stunning. People change all the time. If you ask basically anyone to think back to what there were like five, ten years ago, they'll call their younger selves an idiot or some other insult/expletive. Apparently the writers didn't realize that as Double Date would have been the perfect time to look into that, and how people need to work on always trying to improve their flaws. Hell, I hate hearing people chew food, but not only did I chew with my mouth open a lot when I was a kid (and thus I am an idiot) but I'm constantly trying to find ways to at the very least form a mental block so I don't want to punch someone every time I hear needless audible noshing (good name for a band). Such nuances appear to be lost on the writers though, preferring to tell a story rather than show. Really the fact that it seemed clear the writers were just sort of flying by the seat of their pants as early as Season 3 kind of shows how well they managed to maintain certain elements of the show despite the lack of a map, just a direction that probably should have changed.

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