About the magic and appeal of ‘How I Met Your Mother’

The Show to Last Forever

Firstly, in a shameless effort to take pressure off of me and to keep the criticism of a barely existent readership at a minimum: I haven’t been writing anything in a long time.

Now onto more important things… well at least important enough to make me write a blog about it: How I Met Your Mother. Year ago in the Season 3 premiere Future Ted, voiced by Bob Saget, said:

Kids, there’s more than one story of how I met your mother. You know the short version. The thing with your Mom’s yellow umbrella. But there’s a bigger story, the story of how I became who I had to become before I could meet her. And that story begins here…

… and ends tonight.

I’ll admit that I’ve only started watching the show in Season 5, but I can honestly say that from that point onward I was hooked: Every day morning the first thing I would do is to watch the new HIMYM — episode. HIMYM was the first show to hook me so badly after just a few episodes, young 19 years-old me would not understand the magnitude of being introduced to the show. For the next four years I would watch the show, over and over again, instead of picking up several other shows, I would just keep watching HIMYM again and again. I would understand, breathe and live every single piece of HIMYM.

In a way, with this level of good crazy “fanboy-ism” I am in the minority. Everybody and probably a huge amount of people reading this will at least to some extent agree that either the quality of the show has been declining, maybe also that the format or even the existence of Season 9 is questionable or they only watch the show because they’ve been watching 8 seasons already. (On a side note, exact reasoning was used when asked about Season 8.) Yet nobody can deny that at one point there was such a magic to be felt watching Ted, Marshall, Lily, Barney and Robin live life in New York, sharing adventures and mysteries of pineapples, Naked Men, Landmarks and opening our eyes to the Dobler-Dahmer Theory, the Hot-Crazy Scale and for good or bad the Slap Bet. However, these are not the only things of the show that appeal to my generation.

It’s the stories. For people in the mid-20's or early 30's, it’s watching the show and discovering parallels in their own life. It’s seeing their own life unfold the way Ted’s or Barney’s story do as they are being told in HIMYM. And for 18-years-old me, it’s watching the show, and deeply wishing that life in some way or the other is going to wind up being like that. Certainly, I am not here to ignore the emotional lows every character has had in the show. Barneys heart-wrenching speech after meeting his Dad, Robin being left by Don/Kevin and dealing with her infertility diagnosis and Lily, a character who has been lacking development for about 6 seasons, having an emotional breakdown after the realization of being nothing but a kindergarten teacher who has forgotten to pursuit her own dreams and aspirations. Top spots for darkest hours of the show are undeniably taken by Marshall father’s, Marvin Eriksen’s, death and, for me personally at least, Ted being left at the altar. (Waiting for an Invitation/All The World by Correatown/Benji Hughes really complement Bob Saget’s monologues perfectly, I could watch these two scene for hours.)

But the reason why also these stories, these arguably sad stories, connect so deeply with people is not necessarily the ingenious way the show is written and directed but it is much more the premise the show is written upon. The idea of a love story in reverse. When we started watching ‘How I Met Your Mother’ we always knew what was just a little ways down the road, it’s being certain that at one point in the future the hopeless romantic and, let’s be honest, innately indecisive Ted Mosby does actually meet the mother and gets the life he has always dreamt of. And that’s one of the key components of the show’s format: The way certain episodes (two major examples that come to my mind are “Right Place Right Time” (S3) and “Unfinished” (S6)) are presented we, the watcher, actually feel that almost every even so minor action and encounter will contribute on future Ted being happily ever after. For 9 seasons we actually did know that he would have a son and a daughter and over all a women at his side who deserves him as much he deserved her. And disregarding the parade of sluts he has banged in this relatively short amount of time and also the countless times he fell for Robin, he actually tried and tried so badly to find the woman to Last Forever for so long. If you were rooting for him or not, it didn’t matter: he would meet the love of his life and at the same time actually get the love story he always to wanted to tell his kids.

Frankly, making a huge statement on Ted’s journey is actually insubstantial not only because Ted’s one of the least popular characters (polls and general discussions support this) but also since he is more often than not outshined but other characters whose stories and especially personalities are just as important to the main narrative. In some form HIMYM has always been the spiritual successor of the sitcom classic ‘Friends’: But the chemnistry between the main cast and the way the writer’s have established a balance in story telling and jumping from character to character is only thanks to the brilliant casting and then writing from Season 1 on. Undoubtably, the unique premise, stories and characters of HIMYM will be unmatched for the longest time.

It’s Barney and his journey from losing his first girlfriend then transforming into the alpha of all men with a well-paid job, more women than he could bang and a consistently improving blog and after all finally winning and passing on the Game. Robin’s origins being Canadian pop star ‘Robin Sparkles’, Marshall’s aspirations to become a judge in order to save the world and then, in the 200th episode, we even get a small glimpse into The Mother’s arc. We also get to know about all the other small yet equally important characters, such as Victoria, Stella & Tony, Cindy… all these characters we just met along the way but ended up caring much more than we would’ve thought. Ted basically being Victoria’s ‘Robin’, Stella’s “She’s coming as fast as she can”-speech as an overdue apology to Ted and Cindy, The Mother’s roommate, who dumped Ted but in the end becoming one of the key factors of bringing Ted and The Mother together, actually also got her own happy ending. Just think about it: Looking back to the episode ‘Gary Blauman’, you should notice that Blauman himself was one of the most insignificant and minor characters on the entire show, one of those we haven’t heard of in years. And yet he was brought back, damn hell — they even named an episode after him — Blauman is just the embodiement of all the small characters we learnt to appreciate but also watch fade into the background over the years. The entire episode was a tribute to the stories of Ranjit, Sandy Rivers, Scooter, Patrice, the Karate Kid and all the forgotten Blaumans setting the stage for Monday: a legendary finale for our gang around Ted.

Concluding this stream-of-consciousness-esque blog and in the disillusional belief that someone would actually read this, I honestly want to thank creators and producers Carter Bays, Craig Thomas and Pamela Fryman, the cast, Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Neil Patrick Harris, Cobie Smulders and Alyson Hannigan, and especially Andy Gowan, Music Supervisor, and of course everybody else who has contributed to a phenomenal show and what is at least to be considered one of the TV classics of this generation. How I Met Your Mother has filled a void in my young adult life I never knew I had and will continue to be a substantial part of me as time progresses, no questions asked.