Ridiculous TV Premises Everybody Fell For

[TMC]

http://whatculture.com/tv/10-ridicul...ll-for?page=10

2. How I Met Your Mother Is Supposed To Have A Satisfying Ending

It's not even a matter of debate anymore - the ending to How I Met Your Mother sucked. The resolution to the story was so ineptly conceived and executed that fans of the show that had been hanging on for grim death for nine years (NINE YEARS) were, and still are, outraged.

However. How I Met Your Mother is a sitcom with many gimmicks, but the central conceit - above and beyond the callbacks, the running gags, the references and the dashing back and forth in time - is that the whole thing, two hundred and eight episodes of story, three and a bit straight days of television, is a story being told by protagonist Ted to his kids in the future. It's the story of how he met their mother... and it's a shaggy dog story.

A shaggy dog story is a form in joke-telling. The prototypical version, the one that gives the trope its name, concerns a dog that's incredibly shaggy, the shaggiest dog, a dog that wins prizes for its shagginess. The story of the dog is built up as it wins more and more prizes, until finally it's in the final for the world's shaggiest dog award… whereupon the judges look at it and say, "it's not very shaggy at all, is it?"

The shaggy dog story plays upon the audience's preconceptions about the way jokes are told. The set-up to the punchline is deliberately convoluted and long winded, using delayed gratification and the teller's powers of storytelling to command the attention while the audience is built up to a punchline that, when it arrives, is a deliberate anticlimax.

Sound familiar? How I Met Your Mother sets out its stall early: we know exactly what the premise is. No matter whether the show lasts for one season or ten, the climax will be "...and that's how I met your mother."

The longer the show went on, the more it used delayed gratification and the cast, crew and creative team’s powers of storytelling to keep our attention, distracting us from the absence of a punchline. When Ted finally meets The Mother, it is an anticlimax... and it always would have been.

This, after all, is a shaggy dog story. It's not supposed to have a quality punchline. That's the whole point.