How I Met Your Father has How I Met Your Mother‘s premise, but none of its spark
Turns out it’s tough to recapture HIMYM’s lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry
TV Reviews How I Met Your Father
Divisive finale aside, How I Met Your Mother was a game-changer in the world of network sitcoms. While contemporaries like Modern Family and The Office did away with studio audiences and adapted single-camera setups, the winding story of boy-meets-girl-who-will-bear-his-children took a hybrid approach: Its many freeze frames, flashbacks, flash forwards, and overlapping storylines were shot like a traditional multi-camera sitcom, but they made it impossible to be viewed by a live studio audience in a straightforward manner. (The laugh track came from a crowd watching a completed episode at a later date.) But it sure made it fun to watch.
Now—a full eight years and one failed follow-up attempt later—comes How I Met Your Father. The series replicates HIMYM’s narrative inventiveness, but it’s the chemistry between its leads the new series tries hardest to recreate. There’s the looking-for-love main character (Hilary Duff as Sophie), alongside her best friend/roommate (Francia Raisa as Valentina). They’re balanced out by a similar pair of guy best friends, Chris Lowell as cynical Jesse alongside his Marshall-like committed pal Sid (Suraj Sharma). There’s a Barney-esque character for more outlandish comedic beats (Tom Ainsley as Charlie). And this time, there’s a sixth member of the crew, Jesse’s adopted Vietnamese sister Ellen (Tien Tran), who’s also searching for romance after divorcing her wife.
The possibilities seem virtually limitless, especially for a show taking place in 2022, when twenty/thirtysomethings look for romance in a social environment ruled by Tinder, texting, Uber, and Instagram. (In a further sign that times have changed since HIMYM’s debut, there’s a greater inclusivity in terms of race and sexuality within the main cast.) Duff, who’s used to steering a series from her days on Lizzie McGuire and recently made an appealing comeback on Younger, does a fair job of anchoring the show’s center. Her spark with Lowell is so palpable that finding the father seems almost superfluous at this point—because how could it not be not Jesse? And Jesse’s attempts to reconnect with his formerly long-distance sibling Ellen is one of HIMYF’s most effective plotlines.
Elsewhere, the show falls short. Charlie is a blue-blood whom Valentina brought back from London, and his attempts to fit in with the “poors” are more buffoonish than amusing. (Granted, Neil Patrick Harris left enormous shoes to fill in a similar role.) Sid is in a long-distance relationship that’s obviously doomed. And then there’s Sophie, still determined to find love even after 87 Tinder dates in a single year, when most reasonable people would lower their expectations at that point. Ted Mosby would be proud.
Part of the problem is, without the core chemistry (which may take a few episodes to work out), the new show so far also lacks the clever plot overlays we came to expect from Carter Bays and Craig Thomas’ original series. (For the record, HIMYF is being billed as a “stand-alone sequel” created by Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger, while still utilizing original series director Pamela Fryman). We’ve already seen too many sitcom disaster-party episodes, or crazy-night-out-at-the-club episodes (to name just a few themes from this first handful of episodes) to count, and that multi-cam/laugh track setup now seems even more dated than it did in the 2000s. HIMYF has a fun bit about spotting random Jason Momoa lookalikes that calls back to its parent series’ long-running doppelgänger gags, and a charming Josh Peck shows up as one of Sophie’s many suitors. But with a still-gelling cast, what else does the series have to offer to get it in the running as a definitive hangout comedy for the 2020s?
Well, there’s still that ingenious setup of a love story told backwards. This time, instead of the voiceover parent (R.I.P. Bob Saget) telling the story to his less-than-interested onscreen kids, there’s Kim Cattrall as an older Sophie, resplendent in her 2050 living room, regaling her offscreen son with the tale of his parents’ courtship. She says it’s going to be a long night, raising the question of how long the audience will be invested in the answer to the series’ titular query this time around.
But “This story’s about the journey, not the destination,” adult Sophie tells her offspring, and it seems like a mission statement not just for this series, but a message to those disgruntled with the conclusion of the one that came before it. And, fair enough. But How I Met Your Father is still going to have to raise the stakes on that journey to make it one that viewers will want to take every week.
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I’m shocked, shocked &c &c
HIMYM was my favorite show. Hands down. I even tried to convince myself the finale wasn’t terrible when it aired.
But it was. It ruined the show. A show I used to rewatch every few months I haven’t even made it past the first few episodes since the finale when I’ve tried to watch it. I’m still upset. It was such a let down and could have been so good.
Don’t kill the mother.
Don’t break Barney and Robin up after spending an ENTIRE SEASON on their wedding.
Don’t make Lily’s life bleak as hell.
Don’t send Ted after Robin AGAIN after he let her go (in a terrible balloon metaphor).
Don’t kill the mother (this needs to be repeated).They struck gold in casting Kristin Milotti. A task I thought was near impossible that after building up this unseen character for 6+ years. She was perfect as the mother. And then they killed her.
I was a big fan of HIMYM as well. I think the issue is just how the story was executed.Having the entire final season take place at Barney and Robin’s wedding (after spending two seasons beforehand on them getting back together) was a mistake. If the writers knew they were doomed to unhappiness together, it was a plain mistake to focus so much time on why they were right for each other and how they overcame obstacles to get to the altar.Waiting until the last scene before the finale to get Ted and Tracy together – also a mistake. The show didn’t have to be “How I Met Your Mother” for its entire run, they could have evolved the concept to “How I Courted Your Mother” or whatever. It’s a testament to Milioti that she was able to make her character so likable with minimal screentime. Sucks we never got to see her as part of the main cast for multiple seasons.They just didn’t build to the finale they ended up with at all.
I think the biggest problem was that the show went on too long. The idea that one can love and be happy with more than one person is fairly common in real life, because life does not follow the whole One True Love/Meant to Be story. And the fact that someone who was wrong for you in your twenties is right for you in your forties makes sense. Ted and Robin should have broken up once, and then stayed apart — no pining. But by having them repeatedly come back together only to break up for the same reasons as always 1) was boring and 2) undercut the validity of Ted’s relationship with the Mother.
I think if they were going to kill off the Mother, they should’ve given us more time with them together, introduce her much earlier and show Ted’s grieving process. They seemed dead set on saving meeting the mother for the finale, but if he had met her season 4 or 5 but just continued the show I don’t think anyone would’ve complained. It would make sense for Ted to have a much shorter story about how he met her, and then went into detail about their life before having kids. Especially if she died.
You bring up a good point I never considered, which is that people in their 40s are different than their 20s. But I also agree that the show demonstrated multiple times that they were wrong for each other – it just seemed weird narratively for the show to demonstrate to the audience “these two just aren’t meant to be” and then in the last minute go “gggaaahh, just kidding, yeah they are.” Good points by you.
i never watched HIMYM but this always bothered me about the end of friends, too. ross and rachel were always horrible for each other. seemed likely they would break up 6 weeks after the show finished.
I agree. Friends was a show I watched briefly when it started because I thought it was a cool adult thing to do (I am in my late 30s now). I stopped watching it, but did watch the finale because it was a bit of a cultural touchstone. When she ended up with Ross, it just felt off somehow. At the time I attributed it to the fact that I had not watched it in years and likely missed a ton of context.
Ross and Rachel were terrible for each other. She had zero interest in his work or science in general. He was whiny and insecure. And they never learned to just be upfront with each other. Hemming and hawing isn’t communication.
I think the Friends finale was 10x worse than the HIMYM finale. The entire arc of Friends was built around Rachel’s story from runaway bride to independent woman, only for her to give it all up in the last 5 minutes to go back to a guy who nothing but mistreat her every time they got together. Like you, I assume a year after the finale Rachel is bitterly tooling away at her job in NY and ruing the day she ever decided to get off the plane.
SO much this! I got so tired of one or the other pining for one or the other, depending on which part of which season it was it could be Ted pining for Robin, or Robin pining for Ted. They drove that plot into the ground and kept going with it. After a certain point I just wanted to throw up whenever it bcame a storyline.
I’d agree to some extent. I think they could have kept this as a nine season show had they introduced the Mother midway through the series and had the second half focus on Ted courting and marrying the Mother. Her passing and his return to Robin may have landed better if we hadn’t watched seasons upon seasons of Robin and Ted realizing they’re not right for each other or whatnot. Just to be clear, don’t disagree with you’re saying with regards to real life. My point is more that a TV show’s writing should build to its big moments so fit into what was developed previously. And the biggest issue is HIMYM’s ending really doesn’t fit that well in, it’s basically a rug pull.
Exactly! The show had a premise that was best suited for 4-5 seasons, but it went on for 9. The show underwent a “Cougartown” type shift in tone after first season that didn’t really support its gimmick but plowed on.
“If the writers knew they were doomed to unhappiness together, it was a plain mistake to focus so much time on why they were right for each other and how they overcame obstacles to get to the altar.”This is to miss the point of the show (as I understand it) entirely. The message of the show is: There Is No The One. We don’t have a destiny to be with a certain person and successful relationships are not (only) those that end in the death of one partner. People can be right for each other at one point in their lives and wrong at another point. People can be in positive relationships that improve the overall lives of both partners that still come to a natural end (other than death) and they move on.
HIMYM and Game of Thrones are very similar (for me anyway) Great shows that I loved in the beginning, that became kind of bad after the initial great seasons. Came back very strong in the early part of the final season. Then were derailed by a terrible finale (though GoT went terrible faster in the final Season, whereas HIMYM was great until they broke up Barney and Robin, and killed the Mother)
I defended the finale when it originally aired, and, having rewatched the series somewhat recently (while my gf and I were in the first COVID lockdown and needing a good stress-reducer show), I still mostly stick by my initial reaction.
I by no means think it’s perfect, but the death of the mother was clearly foreshadowed (if not flatly stated) in earlier episodes and the more stark ups and downs of the respective characters’ lives isn’t too out of place with the darker themes the show addressed throughout its run (though, condensed to a single hour where the darkness isn’t diffused by as many jokes).
HIMYM remains, for me, the high watermark for this type of sitcom and I can still drop in and watch a random episode and enjoy the hell out of it. This HIMYF looks pretty dreadful, but I suppose the first previews for HIMYM wouldn’t have looked that great either.
This is pretty much my exact take. The highs of this show were EXTREMELY high for the sitcom format. The finale, while not the best ep, made narrative sense for a 9-season show. (and the wish-fulfillment alternate cut was actually worse, in my opinion). But, I dunno, i think the seeming sloppiness or downer aspects of the show make sense in a contextual way, which they kind of address in the last seasons where Robin’s saying “It’s never gonna be how it was with the five of us hanging out in the bar every night.” This show went 9 years, with everyone in their late 30s by the time it ended. Life changes, and I think it’s OK that they kind of dealt with it.
I personally disliked them killing the mother, but fine, that is a stylistic/narrative choice the writers made and I can accept that. What I disliked was Ted *immediately* going back to Robin. The whole run of the show, the writers took great pains to point out that Ted and Robin weren’t right for each other, even if on paper they seemed like a good match or even seemed to love each other. And that’s okay! They tried, they couldn’t make it work together and then both end up finding love elsewhere. That’s a pretty relatable message to a lot of young adults. But instead, they let Ted have his cake and eat it too. He gets a wife, kids, and then gets to go back to Robin (also single for… reasons) so he can continue to have fun with her even though they both *know* they are not good partners for each other.
From what I remember it wasn’t immediately. The timeline that I saw had several years pass after the Mother’s death before Ted goes to the kids with the story.
Fair point. But I maintain, Ted and Robin should have never ended up together, whether its immediately or 20 years later.
Thank you so much for mentioning Lily’s depressing life. I agree with all of your points, but a lot of people skip over the fact that Lily doesn’t end up in an good place. Every time she goes for her dreams she gets slapped down. In the end she is supposed to be totally happy being Marshal’s wife and nothing else.I love HIMYM for most of its run. The finale brought into focus a kind of misogyny that was baked into the show. Robin got to do all the things she wanted, but had to admit that she wasn’t happy because she didn’t have freaking TED. Lily had to be reduced to dutiful wife. Tracy was an incubator so that Ted could get his kids AND the woman of his dreams (Robin). Tracy’s kids had to be uninterested in any stories about the mother they would never see again in order to support Ted’s desire to bang Robin. All of Barney’s growth had to be thrown aside in order to have Robin be available and finally realize that Ted was perfect.It all sat very wrong with me. Especially since it was pretty easy to rectify. Leave Robin and Barney married. Have Tracy live. Lily becoming satisfied by being a wife and mother is less stark when portrayed as one of a continuum of choices women make, not that pleasing a man is the be all and end all of what a woman should want.
I never really thought that Barney and Robin were that great a couple, so I did not mind when they split. It happens, even after the best of weddings. I agree about Lily: Ted wants to be an architect, is an architect; Robin, newscaster; Marshall, judge; Barney… world’s champion horndog, I guess. Lily wants to be an artist, fails at it, sort of works around the fringes of the art world, does not even end up doing that.
In the last season, Marshall gives up his job so she can move to Italy for a year and be an art buyer.
HIMYM was my favorite sitcom. The cast was fantastic (and Cristin Milioti, in her all-too-brief scenes, fit right in), and the only quibble I had before the finale was that Ted and Robin just never had the kind of chemistry that would make theirs a believable love story.Then the finale happened.I haven’t even been able to watch clips of the show since then, it wrecked me so badly. How can I even sing “Cat Funeral” without thinking about how unceremoniously they wrapped everything up in service of the worst element of the entire series – Ted and Robin?Anyway, the strength of cast was enough to get me past everything else (besides the finale) and I just don’t know if they can strike gold twice. But good luck, I guess.
Look, if you ever thought that The Mother was going to be alive, it’s your own damn fault for not passing 6th-grade reading comprehension.
Among some of the clues:
The fact that The Mother is only ever referred to in the past tense
The fact that The Mother never makes an appearance in the “present day” parts
The fact that Ted always nostalgicly refers to objects that belonged to The Mother (for example, reminding the kids that The Mother made one of their living room paintings. If she were alive, why would they need that reminder?)
The fact that the story begins with how he met Robin (after all, though Ted met The Mother at Barney and Robin’s wedding, the story doesn’t begin with how he met Barney)
The fact that the story repeatedly references Ted and Robin’s agreement to get married if they both found themselves single in their 40’s
Besides, on top of that, there would have been no emotional payoff to the series if The Mother was alive. The way it was, it’s the story of a widower trying to work up the courage to ask his kids for permission to start dating again.
And yet they just as easily could have used this instead with the exact same lead in.
“Look, if you ever thought that The Mother was going to be alive, it’s your own damn fault for not passing 6th-grade reading comprehension.”
Have you seen the alternate ending, and how it actually WORKS?
No? Then shut up.
Yeah, and that’s the problem. The series feels like it was built to end right around when they ran out of Ted & Robin stories, I want to say in the third of fourth season, and they started working to that from day one. It didn’t stop there, though, and the characters had years more development after that.
But because they had already filmed part of this ending, they had to slam all of that into reverse to make it fit with the nine season behemoth they were actually winding down. It’s clumsy. It doesn’t work. Saying it comes out of nowhere isn’t quite accurate because it actually came from between 5-9 years prior.
I also don’t even think people are reacting to the mother dying, per se, so much as they are to the way she’s just sort of made irrelevant by the fact that Ted picks up with Robin right where he left off in the pilot, like the whole show is a speed bump on his one true path.
Most people accept and would even want their partner to find love again after they die, but you’d probably be weirded out to find out they were going to make a grand romantic gesture to try and win back their ex. The ending would almost be better if you saw Ted truly starting over, on a date with a stranger, working to open himself again after loss instead of almost literally resetting his life to a point before he had a family.
Another BIG clue? There’s the episode where Ted’s about to marry Stella, and he says, “Of course, if I had married Stella, things would be different right now” and it flashes to a alt-2030’s Stella coming in and saying, “He’s still telling you that old story?”, which, in retrospect, said, “If your mother was here right now, she’d have stopped me a while ago, but she’s not.”
I feel that HIMYM is one of many shows that should have ended two or three seasons earlier than it did. Everyone talks about how bad the final episodes were but I think that by season 7 everyone had just committed themselves to reaching the end.
A couple of the later seasons were pretty shaggy (but I still enjoyed episodes) but the last season was very good until the finale.
There was a point in its run where, instead of being renewed for just one more season, the network gave them a multiple-season commitment. That was the point when it really felt like the writers were just stalling for time dragging it along.And I wasn’t particularly interested in the larger “Who is the mother??” storyline. I enjoyed the fact that it was just a lot of fun to hang out with all the characters. That’s really what made this show great — it was a fun ensemble comedy about young people living in the big city (in the style of Friends, Happy Endings, and countless others). If this follow-up is to be successful, it’s got to nail the ensemble part of it (and, as the article points out, it takes time to establish that) — the “who’s yo mamma” gimmick is just a framework to hang the rest of the show on — it itself is not the draw.
I used to revisit the alternate ending where they cut out the last few terrible minutes, but it’s so weird that a show that good was so misunderstood by its creators.I’ve been afraid to rewatch How I Met Your Mother. Even the idea of visiting specific episodes is off-putting to me. There is no show I loved as much that has fallen that hard in my estimation.
I still can’t watch that because previous episodes heavily implied that she was going to die.
To everyone saying “but they foreshadowed her death!”:And? I don’t care. I caught the foreshadowing. I saw it happening. And I HATED IT. That’s not the story I wanted nor should have gotten after all the time invested I wanted to be uplifted at the power of love and finding someone who makes you happy at the end of the show. Not a tale of a broken marriage (Barney & Robin), a marriage where only one partner was the one who ended up fulfilled in their life (Lily & Marshall) and one where a partner just straight up dies after popping out two kids after what was only about 7 years together (Ted & Tracy).
That’s not a sitcom. That’s a damn tragedy.
I didn’t LOVE the finale, but I definitely like the aired version better than the alternate cut where the mother doesn’t die. It was foreshadowed a lot throughout the series, and while it wasn’t ideal, it didn’t ruin the show for me, partly because the show ran for so long I can still watch the earlier episodes in a kind of vacuum. And also recognizing that the show’s longevity worked against its long-term narrative. That’s why I didn’t really mind the entire last season taking place over a weekend. There were still plenty of flashbacks to the past during that season, and I thought it was a nice way to switch things up in the show’s 9th season. And Barney and Robin splitting up, Lily feeling like her dreams are slipping away and struggling with being a parent… I dunno, as someone who was about the same age and living in NY, it all felt like a fairly natural evolution of life, at least as much as you can do in a half-hour sitcom.I rewatched the last couple seasons recently, and I will say they stack up pretty well still, and better than most other recent sitcoms. And I was stuck on a plane that was charging 40 bucks for wifi, so I watched half of season 3 instead on the in-flight entertainment, and my god, I’d forgotten how that show was hitting on all cylinders for like 10 eps straight. Just watch the middle of season 3 and all your good feelings about the show come right back.
This was my favorite show on TV when it was airing. I love the rhythms of a good multi-cam sitcom, and I’m a sucker for the kind of idealistic romance that Ted wanted. The show definitely went on too long and that last season is a disaster in pacing, but when the dust settled, I still liked how everything played out.I have a hard time agreeing with *anyone* that Barney and Robin wouldn’t have gotten divorced; their entire relationship was shaky as hell and he was still lying and emotionally manipulating her right up to their wedding.Milioti was an absolute superstar, but I honestly thought it made sense for Tracy to have died. It was really sad, but the story the series had been telling wasn’t the story of Ted and Tracy. It was about Ted and Robin from the very start. The whole series was about him processing his feelings for Robin. The unrequited stage, dating, breaking up, getting over her, letting her go and seeing her as someone who was not just the object of his affection. He moved on and had a great life with Tracy, and then had to process all that grief. Circling back to Robin after a long time, after talking to his kids about the whole thing, that felt right to me. I thought it was a really interesting way of telling a long-term love story that didn’t necessarily trade in the idea of a one-true-love.
Yeah, I kind of understand some of the “not Robin AGAIN” groans, but it all made sense in the end. The story starts with the night he met Robin, and that’s where it ends up. There’s no other reason the story starts there. He wants to tell his kids he’s thinking of moving on.
They could have killed Tracey, but the mistake was him getting over it *immediately* after the montage.
They killed her in the finale, what does it matter who they cast? There was no alternative where Milioti graced our screens for more episodes. Live or dead, that was the last episode of Milioti, and everyone.
It is amazing that they actually hit a home run with Miloti, which was nearly impossible to do… then pissed it all away with how they handled her story. This is like pulling an all-nighter to finish that term paper, getting the research done, writing it well, actually doing a phenomenal job, finishing it with an hour to go… then going to get coffee in the morning and forgetting to submit it on time. Like, you did the hard part well and then messed up the easy part!
Totally agree! I loved this show and Milioti as the Mother is perfect casting.I don’t think I’ve had such a visceral reaction to a finale but it felt like such a rug pull.
Personally, having rewatched the series start to finish a few years back, I think the final season was actually very strong.Some of the middle seasons were huge steps back. The plots became more outlandish, as did the acting. Standard sitcom issues, sure, but it felt very pronounced while binging, more than I noticed when it was on the air.However, the humor and characters felt true again in the final season. Yeah, maybe the plot of how things ended up was less fantastic, but I was there for the ride, not the destination, and the ride was much, much smoother in the final season than the handful that preceded it.That said, making Barnie a hippie fall guy on a revenge trip was absolutely moronic, made so much of him make no sense, and came close to ruining the character. His being a hypocritical Reagan/yuppie capitalist was never the problem, because he was made fun of for it. Making him a rapist was the issue, and weirdly, that’s what they didn’t walk back.
Personally, I consider the alternate ending where Cristin Milioti doesn’t die the official one. It doesn’t make me want to watch the series again, but it makes it way easier to think about it without my eyes rolling right out of my head.
The dead mother never bothered me much, but breaking up Robin and Barney was a travesty.
It did give us this beautiful moment
So that IS Hillary Duff?!?! There were ads playing for this repeatedly while I was streaming something else yesterday, and finally around 9 pm I told my boyfriend, “This whole day I thought that was Hillary Duff. How stupid of me.”And then.
I just really wonder how divorced from reality a show has to be to depict young people’s biggest problem as not being able to find someone to date in 2022. Have the writers stepped outside at all recently?
I don’t know, have you? Because people my age—mid-to-late 20s—definitely still talk about dating and relationships all the time, pandemic be damned.
Yeah but it’s not this all-consuming concern. People are worried about paying rent, jobs, health insurance, etc
Sure, but it’s not like the show pretends it’s a concern above all those either. It’s also not like these comedies spotlight such things so often. The original HIMYM only bring them up occasionally.
It seems like from the trailer and the reviews they’re putting a lot of weight in that direction
Yes. The producers of How I Met Your Father are trying to make a TV show about things people might want to watch. It is a show about people in their 20’s dating. If people want to watch a show about people trying to pay rent and getting a job, they can watch Two Broke Girls. Dating is still something people do in their 20s.
Personally I feel like people are more likely to want to relate to things that feel authentic rather than totally detached, overly idealistic depictions written by people with little knowledge of what young people today are actually experiencing
That may be what you want to watch, but if you feel like people want to watch things that are authentic, then you really haven’t been paying attention to what’s most successful.
The most successful TV shows have always been the broad comedies that don’t get too heavy or cop and medical dramas where the heroes (generally) save the day. Our most successful movies are all fantasies of some kind or another (superheroes now, sci-fi and fantasy like Star Wars and ET before that, even Gone With The Wind, which is the ultimate in fantasy retelling of history).
yeah, NERDS
It’s a sitcom. About dating. Dating and relationships seem like they make sense to be the biggest problems on the show.
(Also, despite being a sitcom about dating, HIMYM spent plenty of time on the other concerns you mention, as well as a lot of others you didn’t.)
How I Quarantined With Your Mother.
It’s a comedy. Not everyone wants to wallow in misery and bile all the time.
HIMYM was a show that grew beyond its premise. But this new show thinks that tired premise is worth revisiting? Also, no Bob Saget.
It grew beyond its premise and the show runners refused to adapt.If they’re willing to have an ending and accept the finite nature of the concept, it gas a chance.
He’s railing coke off the dicks of angels, now
Not just Bob Saget, but it also seems to be missing anybody that would be able to carry as much as any of the people in the original HIMYM. Where’s your Hannigan? Harris? Segel? HIMYM started off with some great, established actors and writers that were great at cribbing the better conventions of older sitcoms, and Radnor and Smulders really shone as relative newcomers. HIMYF could work if Duff & Lowell had what Radnor and Smulders worked with, but the remaining cast and writing seems more akin to aping Chuck Lorre or Whitney Cummings than Norman Lear or Seinfeld/David.
They trialled Bob Saget as the older voice of Hillary Duff’s characters, but apparently test audiences were confused.
They trialled Bob Saget as the older voice of Hillary Duff’s characters, but apparently test audiences were confused.
Wait, people liked HIMYM?
10 year sitcom that was one of the most popular of all time, yes. Well known. 🙄 But I acknowledge your coolness for being above it all.
I respect that people will like what they like and that won’t always align with my tastes. But I never saw the appeal of this one. I’ve seen a couple of episodes and some clips, and every time I was just supremely irritated by all of the characters.
so if this gets canceled after five episodes they’ll just throw in a voiceover “It was clearly Jesse!” at the end.HIMYM was great at the time, but its overwhelming whiteness and Barney’s “shenanigans” (cell door slams) didn’t age very well. Still, hard to believe other than White Castle (and undercover brother) NPH was almost a nobody when the show started, and Alyson Hannigan was arguably the biggest name in the cast (maybe equalish with Jason Segel). I do hope another show uses Alyson Hannigan properly.
I loved and still love this show, but there is SO much of this show that has not aged well in just 10 years. Like, today, “The Naked Man” doesn’t ever make it out of the writer’s room, and the writer who pitched it probably gets fired.
There’s an episode later in the show’s run where Barney literally throws women into the trash after having sex with them.
In a lot of ways, Barney is more of a sociopath than pretend NPH in the Harold and Kumar movies.
Yeah. And it was hilarious. Because the women deserved it for having sex before marriage.
Its funny, people look back at himym and seem to despise Barney as a serious misogynist, but I always read it as a pure parody of misogyny played by an openly gay man
NPH had some Doogie Howser recognition and Harold and Kumar, but Hannigan was definitely by far the most recognized of the cast. I didn’t really know Segel until this show and later Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but he did have the Freaks and Geeks cred
NPH had also kept himself busy in the meantime doing musicals, he played Mark in RENT, and I saw him as Tobias in Sweeney Todd, so he wasn’t a name really but it wasn’t surprising he got a shot…it was surprising that he was cast as a horndog after how moral Doogie was, brilliant casting (just the sex stuff didn’t age well)
NPH had this as his last major sitcom in between Doogie Howser and HIMYM, so someone made an inspired choice that was not so easy to see at that moment:
Stark Raving Mad (TV Series 1999–2000) – IMDb
I agree things didn’t age well. But on the flip side, a lot of sitcoms don’t have the same quality and already have the clear whiteness problem today. Especially CBS shows. A lot of misogyny too. Not saying it’s okay, but I also wonder how it holds up to other shows from that time period. I think comedy in general ages poorly with a few exceptions. It’s very hard to create a comedy that resonates w/ people at the time and then stands the test of time. I mean there were moments of transphobia in the show right? And like back in the 00s the mainstream social liberal view barely considered gay people let alone trans people. Definitely didn’t care about race either. I do wonder with shows like this where you have an established end point, how much of the love interests can be non-white or non-American. Because us as an audience is different than the kids. We can see the race and background of the characters. We almost become a stand-in for the kids so it starts to raise some other questions of why the kids wouldn’t immediately know who it is.
For the new show, we will hear their accents and tell they’re British or Australian. So to me it throws you off when the kid cannot just be like well I know he’s not my dad because he’s not British. I do think if they had casted a foreign woman of color it would’ve been nice because then there’s no worry about a non-white love interest just being there for the sake of diversity
It’d depressing to agree with all of that.
I appreciate you mentioning Undercover Brother but cmon… Starship Troopers!
(puts hand on brain bug because he is psychic for some reason)IT’S AFRAID!
This is a bummer to hear, but not a surprise. So much of HIMYM really skirted the edge of corny schmaltz and ham-fisted comedy that was consistently saved by a remarkable cast. And when it failed, it really thudded.
But… I saw the Greta Gerwig pilot, and I at least hope this isn’t worse than THAT.
The final season and final episode were fine, actually.
I thought the final season’s gimmick was fine, just felt like a waste of a final season, though.
Definitely a different way of doing it.
This doesn’t sound good, but I think Kim Catrall is better off here than that other thing.
What are you talking about? She could have gone to Che’s comedy concert.
I was going to go with “I’m glad Kim Cattrall is getting work. It’s not like there are any other revivals she could be in right now.”
They could’ve found her something to do on Fresh Prince
Yeah she could’ve played a Cocaine Cat Diddler or something equally as Adult and Edgy.
Laugh tracks should be dead.
Okay Kylo Ren.
It’s really jarring for me to watch a show with a laugh track these days. It just feels like an intrusion, the same as people talking at a movie.
I would like to take the time to reiterate that the show should have ended with Ted telling his kids how he met their mother while she was getting ready so they could go meet up with the rest of the gang in the future (women take a long time in the bathroom, amirite? /s). They all meet at McLaren’s. Robin and Barney are still married. Lily has found happiness through other pursuits. They reminisce. Then at the end of the episode, Ted says something like “you know, the only thing I still think about is how that pineapple got there*”. Then Tracy is like “what pineapple?” They tell her the story and then Tracy realizes “holy crap, you know what? I brought a pineapple to my friend’s that night and we wondered what the hell happened to it!” And scene. Everyone’s together. They tie the mom back to the very beginning AND an iconic scene.(*Yes, I know they actually addressed this in I what I think was a deleted scene – just ignore this, since the scene was filmed but cut)I will give this show a shot, especially since I watched HIMYM in syndication, but I also have a feeling it’s going to be an updated retread of a similar story, rather than introducing much new.
And then there’s Sophie, still determined to find love even after 87 Tinder dates in a single year, when most reasonable people would lower their expectations at that point. …or just be single?
Being single is a perfectly fine thing to be. But people who want a long-term partnership aren’t going to be happy without one. Sure, sure, some people think they want it because it’s been drilled into them by society and actually they’d be perfectly happy without. But that’s hardly true of everyone.
I wasn’t a huge HIMYM devotee but I watched and liked it well enough, and it cannot be understated how much the success was due to the cast. That’s true of most successful sitcoms, but I think possibly moreso with HIMYM. For all the wild plot mechanics, it was at its core a hangout show, and was at its best when it embraced that. And everyone talks about NPH, but I really think Jason Segel is the character who, recast with basically anyone else, would’ve been a pretty flat character, but Segel imbued in him something really intangible. I didn’t like a lot of Marshall’s and Lily’s plots, but their chemistry overshadowed that for the most part. You can’t just cast a bunch of pretty people and expect that the writing will take care of it.
Right? You had NPH fresh off a wacky resurgence cameo in Harold & Kumar. You had Jason Segel who is a talented actor, writer, and composer and became a star for the next 15 years. The beloved Alyson Hannigan from American Pie fame. They even knocked out the 23 year old newbie Colbie Smulders. Robin is pretty beloved. It was the cast.
You forgot Allison on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Segel and Smulders were always the heart of that show. I mean, it helps that they were playing the only characters who weren’t objectively awful borderline sociopaths. but their performances often just went above and beyond what they needed to do for this silly network show and became something really heartfelt. (Cristin Milioti was magnificent too, naturally, but the show absolutely wasted her)
*cannot be overstated ugh
was a game-changer
Gwen, you’re better than that.
Does this version have Greta Gerwig’s boobs?
The Duff has some nice gams. I have never seen either act, so I was calling that a wash.
All the whining about the HIMYM finale annoys me more than anything in the finale itself. It was fine. Stop whining!But I didn’t want the mother to die! Yes, and? You wanted a happy ending and that’s not the story that the writers were telling. People get sick and die in real life. Get over it.Barney and Robin shouldn’t have broken up! What…? Barney and Robin were both very broken people. That’s what drew them to each other. Them breaking up makes much more sense than staying together. Barney knocking up a girl and having a kid being what actually sets him straight is much more realistic, as is Robin ending up being a loner.Lily’s life was terrible! Says who? All we really see of Lily being depressed is when it really hits her that her core friend group from her 20s and early 30s is drifting apart. Everyone in their 30s can relate to this feeling, whether you’re the one having kids or watching everyone else have kids. Otherwise, yes, we don’t ever see much of what she’s up to in the future, but why is it the default assumption that she doesn’t have a fulfilling life? She was an art buyer for a super rich dude, there’s no reason to think she didn’t continue in that line of work. And even if she didn’t, she has three kids. Implying that being a dedicated mother can’t be a fulfilling life is pretty damned misogynistic.
Ted and Robin were always wrong for each other! Sure, they were very wrong for each other when they were in their 20s and 30s, they wanted very different things for their lives. But at the end of the finale when Ted is holding up the Smurf penis they’re both pushing 50. They’ve already done all those things. Why is it so hard to imagine that their priorities have changed after so long? If we want to stick with the metaphor of Ted letting her go like a balloon, well the balloon came back down.
I’m not saying that they couldn’t have done things differently or better, but the main complaints are always that you didn’t get the happy warm fuzzy ending that you wanted. The idea that that would ruin the entire show for you to the point that you can’t watch reruns anymore is completely absurd.
The Barney character needs to be a woman for HIFYF to work.
Personally, I think they should have just rebooted HIMYM as a gritty drama, like with ‘Bel-Air’. The twist is that the main character is not the kids’ father; it’s the story of how he met, and subsequently started stalking, their mother. He’s already killed their father, and is just waiting for the mother to come home while telling his story to the (offscreen) captive and terrified children.The other twist is that it’s still Ted.
I was mildly interested in the first paragraph. I am 100% SOLD after the last sentence.
So, here’s a question. I never really watched the original show. I caught bits of reruns before another show I watched (may have been Seinfeld reruns, I don’t recall), and it looked enjoyable, but in those days before streaming, and without a DVR, the times the show aired just didn’t fit my schedule. I can now obviously stream the show anytime I want if I choose to watch it, but reading all the comments about how the ending basically ruined the show, is it still worth giving the show a look?
I would say yes. The original show is still one of my favorites, and honestly I feel like the finale controversy is/was overblown. I think there is just a very vocal minority that absolutely hated it but everyone I know who watched it thought it was “fine”. It just didn’t live up to the incredibly high standards the show had accomplished before. Also if you don’t like the original finale, you can just accept the alternate ending as canon (like I do). There are some aspects of it that didn’t age well, specifically with the character Barney. I was always able rectify that with the idea that the main character was telling a story, so it’s all very exaggerated. He goes from a womanizing friend who had a good paying job to the cartoon character who is insanely wealthy and does everything he can to trick women into sleeping with him.
Yes. People get too hung up on the last episode. For a show that was about the journey, the journey was worth the time. Like any long running series there are peaks and valleys, but overall it’s a good show that gets great mileage out of the cast chemistry, some very creative episodes, and the occasional plot twist.
so at the end of the first episode they reveal the kid is half-squid and we’re like “Josh Peck probably isn’t the father”
Inserting obligatory defense for the HIMYM finale. I absolutely loved it.
I have never watched a single episode of this show (nor do I plan to), but I quite enjoy and appreciate the commentary.
I knew looking at the cast it wouldn’t be any good, they’re all either too pretty or too bland and you don’t have anybody here with snappy comedy chops except for maybe Francia Raisa who in a more just universe would be the main character here. Also the premise would be way more interesting if the main character was looking for a known donor instead of a love connection because it would provide a looser more chaotic dynamic and of course eventually love finds a way yadda yadda, instead of the clear cute heteronormative thing being the crux of it all.Its kinda hard to see a person who I guess is meant to be early 30’s only shooting for love marriage and baby carriage in a straight line. If she was she’d already have been on that track already…usually.