Let's talk sitcom IV: How I Met Your Mother

Disclaimer: Please be aware of the fact that in a commentary such as this series, "spoilers" may be plentiful. This may go without saying, but for this show I still want to explicitly point it out.  

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At first viewing, How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) didn't seem very special. It's premiere was shortly after Friends had wrapped up their business and this was yet another show set in New York (were there no other cities in the US at all?) circling around the lives of a young group of friends. The main difference seemed to be that the gang in HIMYM frequented a bar instead of a coffee shop but other than that it was hard to not dismiss the show as some form of rip off of what had come just before it. "Make up your own format, dude."

Adding to that, the premise was that we as an audience were forced to listen to an older version of the main character taking an awfully long time to answer the question of the show's title. Season after season we were baited with this mystical woman which soon, very soon were about to show up, but first Ted Mosby needs to screw that girl, and that girl and that girl (is he really telling these tales to his kids? What is that about?) and when she's finally brought in, the show decides to drop the ball in the most epic fashion and do away with her almost immediately.

Yeah, before the disastrous ending of Game of Thrones, HIMYM was largely considered to be the show with the worst final seasons of almost any genre. Not only did they botch the character which everyone assumed was the point of the whole thing, the season before they spend basically the entire time centered around a wedding that led to nowhere and was undone shortly there after. If one were a fan of the show one quite easily felt played with, why did one hang around for so long if it wasn't anything more to all of this? Was it all a big joke? 

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Indeed. The primary structure of HIMYM felt rather done during its run. The classic tropes of what sitcoms had become in this era formally poured in, Barney felt like a more unhinged carbon copy of Joey from Friends, the dating habits of Ted Mosby we were forced to care for wasn't the first "mission to find the One" we as an audience had suffered in the context of a sitcom and again, "20-year olds doing stuff in New York" wasn't precisely a concept fresh out of the oven at this point. 

All this mentioned, HIMYM was still just a solid, funny show at its core. Barney aside the characters of the main group was easy to like and care for and even if Barney was presented as a sleaze boy of the highest order, his shenanigans and odd take on life was still hilarious to follow. Ted Mosby - the narrator of the whole thing - was largely annoying, his self-centeredness and non-ability to change his ways even though he spent serious time reflecting on them could easily make you gnaw your teeth in frustration but in the end he was also relatable and even if we hardly could stomach another "Ross and Rachel" story with his obsession over Robin and the theme of "will they, won't they" going on also around them it was fine everything considered. It's an understandable plot device to use to make a sitcom like this fit together and we all knew Ted and Robin would not be the final item at the end of things. She's clearly not the Mother and she is the one we all are waiting for... 

Here's the thing. The defining trait of the comedy style of HIMYM was their general playfulness with the storytelling format. When the premise is that everything we are seeing is the verbal story of an older Ted Mosby talking to his kids any kind of realism is merely optional but not required in the slightest and even if HIMYM seldom went absurd or clownish with this reign of freedom they still used it heavily with a tonne of creativity and smartness included. They may have been a somewhat generic sitcom in all other areas of their general structure but the way they told their therefore relatively predictable episode plots always felt fresh and engaging. This was what they brought to the table of the genre, this was their hallmark. "We may use the same ingredients as everybody else, but you will not recognize the dish regardless. Promise." 

And as said. It works fine. The show is funny, weird, yet perfectly wholesome. A pristine sitcom. If only it weren't for the damned finale... 

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It took a while until I felt for giving HIMYM another chance but eventually I decided to re-see it with fresh eyes. One thing I had learned consciously this time around was the concept of the unreliable narrator. Everything we get to see in the show is told by Ted Mosby. He is the source and the focal point of everything that goes around in the series. Have we got any guarantees that he is telling the truth? That he even tries to? Nay, we are not seeing "the truth" of the events described by Ted, we are seeing his memories of them. Okay, the show doesn't indicate that Ted is an ill intended liar who hates his friends and their earlier lives together but even an honest person with the best of intentions will misremember, will construct their memories to protect certain values they might not even be aware that they care for in their own subconscious mind. The show is told exclusively from this uncertain, unstable perspective and if one wishes to find any deeper meanings of the show this is crucial to remember, I would argue. 

I can hear HIMYM-fans mumbling nervously at this point. This fact described above is of course no secret among the fans of the show and if the unreliable narrator-device is seen as a license to disregard any content of the events of the show in favor of one's own fan theories of "what really happened" its been watered down to uselessness. I will try to avoid that trap and any theory of mine should be seen as mere suggestions, not an attempt to overwrite the version Ted
is giving us. 

I would still argue however that the device in question is crucial to understand what the show is all about and why it allows itself to use so many classic tropes of the ongoing genre. It's not because it's particularly lazy or lacks imagination, it is in my mind because the show wishes partly to be a comment on the overarching theme of sitcoms and how they may be affecting the psyche of their audience. It also wants to be a fun show in general of course and this is why they make this part of their "agenda" so subtle and relatively easy to miss. The story of Ted Mosby has a meta-view attached to it, a view that is quite critical of our tendency to constantly storify our lives. A sitcom can portray life in this way, that everything in a persons life journey is neat, tidy and easily connectable to various boxes one needs to tick in order to have a "perfect life" and if one consumes a lot of sitcoms told in this way one can easily get the impression that it "always" ends up this way and if a life for some reason doesn't check all these boxes of the modern life it's not really worth living. At least one has to wish for something else entirely and hence the need for yet another sitcom that tells the story of the "perfect modern life" yet another time. 

HIMYM won't fall for this. At least not without a commentary of the whole process that is going on. Ted Mosby is one of these people who constantly turns the events of his life into a story and the show drags us into his magnum opus in this regard: How he met Tracy, the mother of his children. But since the creators of the show want Ted Mosby to have lived a real life and not a sitcom- polished version of what one of these entails, Teds story runs into so many weird alleys and dead ends. His life often doesn't go anywhere, whether it is his career or love life he experiences plenty of stuff that engages him for quite a while without giving him any real payoff in the end. They just happen but there is no time to mourn because whatever life actually is, it simply just moves on and doesn't care too much of your thoughts about it. 

This view is explaining, I would say, why the wedding of Barney and Robin was allowed to take so much space - so much engagement from the characters and the audience only to lead to a very short-lived marriage. For a generic sitcom this is awful storytelling, for a show with a critical view of how easily boxed in life can get in those shows it is almost to be expected. Life just happens and what we at one stage might think will be the highest point of our identity journey may at another stage of it all be seen as utterly insignificant. And this is ultimately why the oh so lovely Tracy is allowed to die so shortly after she gets introduced to us. It is heart wrenching, but it is also part of life. Yes, even with this view I'm critical of Teds decision to go back to Robin the way he does but you see: HIMYM is something so odd as a show that is substantially better the second time you watch it compared to the first! 

If you go blindly into the show and follow the long journey up to meeting Tracy, her death will crush you out of any way of conceptualizing what has happened under the journey. You will just be sad, bummed out and angry with Ted for telling such a stupid story but if you know, as the kids listening naturally does, that Tracy is dead you can see the long and dwindling story of Teds young adulthood for what it is. An attempt by the widower Ted to be at peace with everything that happened to him, underscore the thread that led him to Tracy - the best thing of his entire life - but also explain how now when she's gone another major part of his life, aunt Robin, is starting to get their time to really shine. 

The story was in part all about Ted and Robin and how life's just general randomness just made it impossible for them to be a real item for so long but suddenly all that they've been through and all that they've learnt along the way also makes them perfectly suited to share the latter stages of life with one another. When you know the ending, it's so much easier to see the show's meta commentary through the various stories of Ted - it would be a drag to explain too much of them but I just want to point out that there is an important time in particular where Mosby finds himself hallucinating the whole episode alone in the bar. This particular chapter feels so vastly different the first time one sees it versus the second. 

If you liked HIMYM but just gave up on it after the abysmal reception of their ending seasons I would recommend you to give it another go. When you know what's coming and the show can't punch you in the gut any longer, the experience is wildly different.  

A bit on a fan theory 

I already admitted the danger of leaning to heavily on the device of the unreliable narrator and even if I like personally to sort out what of Mosby's stories which would be accurate also according to his friends or other witnesses and which wouldn't, those speculations isn't really shareable. 

One thing however must be commented. The description of Barney isn't trust worthy whatsoever! For fans of the show this is not a new revelation, but for those perplexed how Barney could go from a kindhearted hippie to a full-blown merciless crony capitalist who treats women as if they were nothing but very disposable objects so easily - then the answer is: he didn't. Ted doesn't have much reason to lie or twist the reality of his stories in general, but when it comes to Barney he does. Barney shared his obsession with Robin, so much so that Barney was the one who got to marry her and even doing so with Ted's blessing, Barney managed to fail the marriage in a rather pathetic fashion. 

I have no reason to think that Ted hates Barney, but he is undoubtedly conflicted about his real feelings about him in a way that makes it impossible for him to make his story straight about it all. I don't even have a clear image of what "accurate" Barney is supposed to be like, I just know that he didn't sleep with the piles and hoards of women in the way Ted claimed he does parallel to him pursuing Robin, and he might be a man of weird habits due to a complicated upbringing and having an odd job but everything around Barney we see in the show is surely exaggerated or even twisted entirely. It sounds like Barney isn't around in Ted's life anymore and that he couldn't care less if he gets the details, huge or small, about him told incorrectly. From what I've seen the production haven't admitted anything other than that the actor Neil Patrick Harris agrees that the character likely is rather exaggerated at times so you have to be the judge of it all - but to me this perspective on especially Barney makes it so much easier to stomach the incongruities the show allows itself to run wild with at times. The events are presented as true and accurate, but they are also just a story from someone with - by necessity - an agenda. 

It's worth remembering, that is all.