How I Met Your Mother is ending in two weeks. It started in
2005. Back then, Peyton Manning had yet to win a Super Bowl and Tom Brady had
won three of the last four (since, just to gloat, Manning has been to more and
Brady hasn’t won one). Back then, I was in my Freshman year of High School,
taking Honors LA with that devil Mrs. Gray (I can say these things because
there is no chance she reads this), and some admittedly good teachers. Back
then, the first iPhone had yet to be released. Hell, the Click Wheel hadn’t
even been perfected. How I Met Your Mother debuted a year after the US Office,
but before Parks and Recreation (started in the 2009-10 season), Community,
Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, and every single other sitcom currently on
a network apart from Two and a Half Men. And within 14 days it will all be
over. Ted will meet the mother. We will go back to not caring about the show. I
just wish enough people never did.
How I Met Your Mother started out as a show the critics
loved, but a show that got bad ratings (oddly, the ratings HIMYM got then would
be considered excellent within five years – but that’s a story for a different
day). It was inventive, playing with time and structure all within a show that
had a traditional setup. It made you care and want for a relationship that they
told you was doomed from the beginning. It was unlike anything else on TV at
the time. Over the past nine years, the show has gained an audience, at least
when compared to everything else on TV, but lost the critics support. It became
a show that had to create barren plot devices instead of rely on its inventive
roots. It was a show that had to ruin characters for jokes, and grind each
laugh out of the five characters. It was a show I never hated, but hated
watching knowing where it came from. This all could have been avoided, too.
Despite fledgling ratings at the time, and no certainty it
would continue, HIMYM creator’s Carter Bays and Craig Thomas (Carter &
Craig) ended the 2nd season not only without Ted meeting a mother,
but with Ted breaking up with a woman and Barney literally in mid-word. The
show could have ended then, and it would have been a beloved cult and critical
hit, lamented for leaving the air too soon before they were able to please us
and before Ted was able to meet the mother. But it would have been remembered
as a great show, with two classic seasons that stand up to almost anything
comedic ever put on television (honestly I, and many people more qualified than
me, feel that strongly about how good HIMYM was through its first two seasons).
Instead, it became what it became. It made Carter & Craig, not to mention
the five cast members, exponentially more famous and rich, but it ruined a show
that had something so good. And that’s where I come in…
I started watching HIMYM back in its 2nd season.
Looking for a new comedy to watch after Friends ended (admittedly, two years
before), I happened to come across HIMYM. The only actor I knew was Alyson
Hannigan, but even then I hadn’t seen that many Buffy episodes at the time (and
none of the American Pie Trilogy). But she was on it, Cobie Smulders, who was
beautiful, was on it, and I knew Neil Patrick Harris somewhat from Harold and
Kumar. I started watching in that second season, without seeing the first, and
fell in love with a show so unique. It played with time, it perfected the idea
of the unreliable narrator. More than everything, it was just funny. It had a
great character in Barney that they knew how to use, and five castmembers that
all worked well together. It was gold.
Seven years later, I almost feel bad saying I still watch
it. I find it slightly better than most internet types, but it is squarely a
disappointing 22 minutes each week, and it has been like that for a few years
now. Somewhere after Season 4, the year that ended with Barney and Robin
hooking up, the show lost itself. In a way, there’s a strange parallel between
HIMYM and Friends. Both shows had two previously platonic characters hook up
near the end of their 4th season despite them not being the romantic
leads. Chandler and Monica was a real surprise, unlike HIMYM where Barney first
realized his love for Robin in Season 3, but it was a shock nonetheless.
Despite these being nice ideas at the outset, both crippled their shows
forever.
This was supposed to be Ted’s journey. This was about Ted
meeting the love of his life. It wasn’t about Ted’s friend and ex-girlfriend
hooking up, getting married and coincidentally hiring Ted’s future wife as
their bass player. What’s more is that we were supposed to be with Ted on this
journey. The HIMYM pilot, a Top pilot of any show ever, was noteworthy in that
it presented the story of a man talking about meeting his wife, then showed
that man meeting, falling for and then wooing a perfect girl, and then ended by
subverting the whole thing telling us, the audience, she wasn’t ‘The One’. It
was pretty ballsy and it worked, but over time, Ted’s quest for ‘The One’
became sidelined, became a periphery story, something that kept the show moving
but was never too important, and that killed the heart of the show.
In the end, what killed HIMYM really wasn’t the cast or even
the creators, but the disease that kills almost all great shows over time:
Nostalgia and a Loss of Ideas. No show is supposed to last 10 years. The
business model doesn’t really allow it. Sure, some do. HIMYM will last nine.
But most don’t. Few last even two years. I firmly believe Carter & Craig
just never had nine years’ worth of ideas in them. At some point between Season
5 and Season 8, they ran out of stories for these characters. For some it was
earlier than that. Barney was the real litmus test. He was ‘awesome’ in every
way early on, but that was because outside of his success with women, he was awesome.
He licked the Liberty Bell. He had a ridiculous job no one knew about. He was
AWESOME. Over time what made him awesome devolved into his ability with woman
and nothing more. It ruined Barney as a character, and was an early sign the
show was running out of ideas.
What hurts the most was that even in later seasons, every
now and then Carter & Craig hit it out of the park with something. The best
example is the death of Marshall’s father in Season 6, a half-season long
storyline that worked tremendously well throughout its run that year. The show
still did emotional moments better than any sitcom on the air this side of
Parks and Recreation (and even then, it is close), but kept on undercutting
those emotional moments with the same theme over and over again. To count the
number of times Ted has emotionally proclaimed to be giving Robin up for good I
would need to start using toes. It hurt, because while it was always well acted
and hit all its marks, it was always a sense of ‘this again?’.
So many times over the past four years I have thought that
to myself. Barney banging another girl?
Marshall and Lily having another familiar marital squabble? Ted falling for and
then letting Robin go? All of it felt too familiar and too recurring. It pained
me to watch an original show mess itself up with old, tired stories. The show
lost the sense of what made it great, which was those character and the stories
they put them in. When I run through the storylines in Season 1, they all make
me happy. They all make me remember a young show, fully of energy and unique
excitement. It doesn’t at all resemble the show that it became today, a jaded,
tired look at five friends who are too old to keep doing these same
shenanigans.
It’s not fair to put this on HIMYM alone. They are victims
to an industry-wide disease, one that effects almost every show. HIMYM is far
from the first show to fall victim to it, and there will be many more in the
future that fall victim to the same fate as well. It happened to The Office, it
happened to Friends, to Cheers, to basically every show that lasted longer than
five years. Honestly, it is happening, but to a lesser degree, on Parks and
Recreation right now, which is a real shame given the amazing quality of that
show through its first four seasons.
A great test to see if this is happening to a show is to try
to think of the major storylines in each season. If the storylines are easier
to remember during the early years of a show rather than the later seasons, you
know the shows been afflicted with nostalgia disease, and it is so apparent in
HIMYM. I can give you episode by episode story arcs for the first two seasons
of HIMYM, and do about 80% of it for the 3rd and 4th
seasons, but anything after that and I’m lost. I really can’t tell you what season
Ted dated Zooey, or what season ‘The Wedding’ was first initiated as a plot
device. That’s a problem. I can’t really name the episodes of the last few
seasons. The great episodes of the first few just ran off the tongue. They were
great. These are not, and it feels so bad to watch them slide further and
further into mediocrity.
I used to love my weekly half hour with HIMYM. I was a
constant contributor and poster on the HIMYM iMDB messageboard. That’s not
exactly something to be proud of, but it’s not the opposite either. It was an
interesting little community back then. I posted heavily throughout Season 3
and 4, and then slowly waned off after that. By Season 6, I was done. I don’t
think I’ve posted there since ever. I don’t miss wasting that time, but do miss
that Community, and that’s what How I Met Your Mother represented more than
anything. It was a Community. Early on, not that many millions of people
watched HIMYM. We were a little small community of people watching and enjoying
this brilliant show. Then, HIMYM started finding commercial success and we all
switched our time to other shows that were constantly battling renewals, like
Community, Happy Endings, Parks and Recreation. Sure, it is easy today to say
those were also just better shows, but compared to what HIMYM used to be, they
weren’t.
I would put Season 1-2 of HIMYM up against any one of those
shows, and against almost every sitcom I can think of apart from the true best
of the best (Seinfeld, Arrested Development, to me). The show was that good,
and it is so far from it now that it kills me each Monday. Sadly, I actually
think the last few seasons are better than many other people, who have started
to lump it in with Two and a Half Men, and even worse, the worst sitcoms that
have been on TV in recent years. That’s not fair. It isn’t that bad, it’s just
a show who’s setup never allowed for such LONG-form storytelling.
HIMYM will end in two weeks and we will finally learn how
Ted meets the mother, and that story that serves as the thread connecting each
episode of the show. But it also serves as a great way to view how far the show
fell. Early on, Ted’s quest was something special about the show. The idea that
it wasn’t Robin was sad, but impressive, as was Ted’s optimism. Over time, Ted
got more and more annoying, the quest got more and more like a Rube Goldberg
device. The little hints and near-misses became more and more idiotic and seen
as a way of extending the show while still giving the fans what they wanted.
Carter and Craig never learned that this is not the story
the fans wanted. I actually don’t know what story they did want, but it wasn’t some
long story of Ted and Barney banging hundreds of girls while giving some hint
about the mother every seven episodes. Early on, not every episode was about
Ted’s quest, but a lot were at least about something tangible that Ted learned
that turned him into someone better. This has continued but to no real effect.
Every episode there is some sort monologue by Bob Saget (voice of future Ted)
about something he learned but nowadays they’re all pretty terrible and shoe-horned
into the same dumb plots.
I’ll always try to remember HIMYM as the show that was so
good in its first few seasons. I’ll remember the long nights I spent after its
2nd season worrying about if it would be cancelled, if we would
never meet ‘The Mother’, if the show would end mid-sentence. What if it was
cancelled? The show would almost assuredly be on those ‘gone too soon’ lists
that shows like Freaks and Geeks dominate right now. It would be remembered as
a cult classic, as a ‘What Could Have Been’, instead of a ‘Why Did It Be?’.
That’s no great legacy of a show, but that’s what happens when you last so long
on TV when you never expect. The biggest gift a TV show can get, more time on
air, can also be its downfall.
