“I thought I’d never see that girl again. But it turns out, I was too close to the puzzle to see the picture that was forming.” –Ted Mosby, in the pilot episode of How I Met Your Mother
Kids, way back in 2005 I started watching a new TV show called How I Met Your Mother…
How I Met Your Mother has occupied a spot in CBS’s Monday night lineup for eight years, an impressive run by primetime TV standards. But in the months before the 2007-08 TV season, the fate of CBS’s two-year-old sitcom hung in the balance.
I was working in TV then and was paying admittedly too much attention to the news surrounding CBS’s 2007 upfront. (An upfront is an industry conference at which a TV network previews its fall lineup to whet the appetites of potential advertisers.) HIMYM was hardly a shoo-in to be renewed for a third season, but it was my favorite show at the time and I was really hoping it would be picked up. (It was.)
The show’s main character, Ted Mosby, was a 20-something living in New York City. He was on a perpetual search for the girl of his dreams, and spent a copious amount of time in the bar downstairs from his apartment with his friends. I connected with it immediately. I felt like it was to my generation, Gen Y, what Friends had been to Gen X.
When I told people that HIMYM was my new favorite show–and that they had to start watching it immediately–I would often mention that the Ted character was just like me. After all, he was single and I was single. He was a hopeless romantic; I once made a girl a mix CD in high school. He lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; I lived in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was an architect; I had a job also. Like I said, we were basically the same person.
The show was tailored to my demographic; the cast felt like it was hand-picked for us ‘80s kids. The series was and still is headlined by Neil Patrick Harris, relaunching his career post-Doogie Howser, M.D. and coming off a hilarious cameo in the cult film Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.[1] HIMYM also features Alyson Hannigan, everybody’s favorite band geek from the American Pie movies, and Jason Segel, who was on the verge of becoming a star after some notable work on two one-season Judd Apatow TV series, Freaks & Geeks (NBC) and Undeclared (FOX). (Hannigan and Segel play the series’ perfect couple.) Even the show’s narrator, a future version of Ted in the year 2030, is voiced by former Full House star and America’s Funniest Home Videos host Bob Saget.
[1]In season 3 the show references Doogie’s pensive journal entries at the end of each episode. Also, Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) have each appeared on HIMYM.
I also bought in on the show’s “Ross and Rachel” characters, Ted (Josh Radnor) and Robin (Cobie Smulders), who were relatively unknown actors at that point. By the end of the first episode I’d already developed a mancrush on Radnor, not unlike the one I had on Scrubs and Garden State star Zach Braff.[2] As for Smulders, she was perfectly cast as an attractive yet attainable love interest for Ted.
[2]Like Braff, Radnor wrote, directed and starred in his own film, Happythankyoumoreplease.
As the show’s title suggests, the premise has Future Ted (Saget) telling his teenage son and daughter (and the audience) the story about how he met their mother, about 25 years later. All sorts of New York City-centric randomness happens along the way—as it often does in real life—en route to Ted actually meeting the mother of his children. Each of the first few seasons left viewers questioning whether Ted’s current romantic interest would end up being be “the mother,” but as long as the show kept being funny and fresh, we were content not to meet her until Ted was good and ready.[3]
[3]Though Robin was ruled out as the mother in the pilot episode when Future Ted refers to her as “Aunt Robin,” it didn’t stop some of us from trying to find a loophole to explain how Robin and Ted still might have ended up together. They were just so good together!
Beyond the glaringly obvious comparisons between Ted’s life and my own, I responded to the show’s propensity to capture the zeitgeist of being young and single in New York City. The show had a knack for portraying what it was like those of us who were figuring out what kind of person we wanted to become, while simultaneously figuring out what kind of person we wanted to be with.
In one episode, Ted finds an old shirt in his closet and can’t remember why he stopped wearing it, which leads him to contact an ex-girlfriend and revisit their relationship (“Return of the Shirt”). In another, Ted’s friends are tired of him constantly overthinking his love life and convince him to overdrink instead. He wakes up to a pineapple on his nightstand and a strange girl[4] in his bed, causing him to piece together his evening with his friends’ help (“The Pineapple Incident”).
[4]Further evidence that the show was pandering to my generation from the beginning, the “strange girl” is played by Danica McKellar, or Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years.
Meanwhile other early episodes explored relatable themes like coffee house baristas butchering your name (“Swarley”); trying to plan a New Year’s Eve party that doesn’t fall flat (“Limo”); saying goodbye to a relic from your younger years which might also signify a transition to full-blown adulthood (“Arrivederci, Fiero”); or starting a relationship with someone without technically ending the one you’re already in, especially late at night (“Nothing Good Happens After 2 A.M.”).
Yet somewhere along the way, HIMYM stopped feeling like the same show it once was.[5] Seasons 4 and 5 revolved around Barney’s romantic feelings for Robin, who by that time is Ted’s ex-girlfriend and roommate (occasionally with benefits), creating a scenario that is not only bizarre but altogether implausible considering all the history between them.
[5]I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I stopped enjoying HIMYM. There was no “jump the shark” moment a la Happy Days—though the final episode of season 4, “The Leap,” has the gang literally jumping from their rooftop to a neighboring one to symbolize their willingness to take a leap of faith in their lives and careers.
For a while I thought I was the only one who found the Ted-Robin-Barney love triangle strange, particularly because they all still spent so much time together. But I recently caught a few minutes of an episode from season 7 (“Ducky Tie”) where Ted runs into an ex-girlfriend, Victoria, from season 1. (Victoria, a baker Ted met at a wedding, was an early candidate for “the mother.”) Ted explains that he is no longer dating Robin, but that he and Robin and Barney, also an ex of Robin’s, still hang out all the time. Victoria, like many of the show’s viewers including myself, finds the situation incredibly weird.
Beyond the Ted-Robin-Barney stuff, the balance the show had once perfectly struck as a “dramedy,” equal parts drama and comedy, no longer felt quite right to me. (That balance is what sustained shows like Scrubs, HBO’s Entourage, and more recently FOX’s Glee, when they were at their best.) HIMYM‘s humor felt forced, while the stories weren’t compelling enough to stay tuned week after week.
In fairness, HIMYM did have a few clever storylines in the later seasons that were culturally relevant: Ted goes on a blind date with a woman without realizing (at first) that he’d blind dated seven years earlier (“The Blind Date”); Ted is kept as a back-up by a girl who already has a boyfriend (“Hooked”); Ted brings a girl home only to have her fall asleep right away, leading to Barney suggesting that she simply wanted a place to crash for the night rather than to hook up with Ted (“The Sexless Innkeeper”).
But as the writers sought to extend the life of the series–which they may never have envisioned lasting as long as it did–the search for the mother seemed to take a backseat to other storylines, leaving viewers like me to wonder whether we, like Ted in “Hooked,” were being strung along. (To their credit, the show addressed this over the summer in a hilarious promo which has Ted’s kids channeling the audience’s frustration with the lack of resolution on the meeting the mother issue.)
I eventually gave up on the show. Friends would ask me if I still followed it, including those who I’d turned onto the show in the first place. When I explained to one such friend why I now find the show unwatchable, he said, “Yeah, I know what you mean…but I’m pretty much committed at this point.” I imagine my fellow Lost fans might have felt the same way.
Ultimately TV is a business. Networks are always going to milk a show for all its worth, even if that means spreading out a story arc (e.g. how a character met the future mother of his children) thinner than it’s meant to go. Few shows actually leave their fans wanting more—two that come to mind for me are The Wire and Breaking Bad, each wrapping up after just five seasons, not to mention Dave Chappelle’s decision to stop making Chappelle’s Show[6]—because most networks (and showrunners) aren’t willing to walk away from money on the table.
[6]Chappelle famously walked away from a two-year, $50 million contract for a third and fourth season of his show. While many people dismissed him as “crazy,” he insisted that the quality of the new episodes he’d done was simply not up to snuff with the first two seasons. After Chappelle left the show, Comedy Central aired the new episodes anyway. Turns out, he was right.
The final season of HIMYM premieres on September 23 (8 pm), and, despite everything I’ve said above, I plan to tune in to see how it all ends. I haven’t watched a full episode since season 5, including last season’s finale in which “the mother” finally appears on screen. Maybe the writers have been saving the best for last, and Ted’s nine-year wait to find the mother will be as worth it for the audience as it was for him.
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