All things considered, it is actually kind of ironic. Deb handed off the honor of covering How I Met Your Mother to me because she felt she didn’t love the show enough to cover it in a positive light, and here I am — in one of my first couple of posts on the show — not necessarily loving it myself.
If I learned anything from Studio 60, it’s the phrase “Buy the premise, buy the bit.” Tonight, it was all about Ted being a douche by allowing his revolving door of a love life affect his friends’ lives. This, unfortunately, is nothing new. It’s high time that we actually see some growth from our characters. They’ve seen very little change from who they were in the first episode of the series. This show does so many things so well, but in this case, a little more effort wouldn’t hurt.
That being said, there were a couple pretty damn funny payoffs to some of the jokes that were set up:
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve still got a lot of faith in the show. I’m not jumping up and down saying that we need to meet the titular mother sooner rather than later. But I think it’s high time to come up with something for Lily and Marshall to do each week (baby time?). And put Robin and Barney back together; that seemed to piss off everyone but me!
Notes & Quotes:
Clacked by Ivey West 
on Mar 22, 2010 @ 21:27 EST5EDT
HA! As I was watching I kept saying to Keith, “I’m so glad Ivey’s covering this one tonight!” I can’t believe they totally blew the Barney joke by having a bad picture of him at the end … ruined the mystique!
And Ted wasn’t the only selfish ass in this episode — grow up Lily; your friends shouldn’t have to make the earth turn just for you once a year… ugh.
I’m all for Barney and Robin back together!!! :)
I think that the Barney picture joke was not funny. At first it was, but then it got really lame, when Robin tried to make a photo of him eating chips. I like that, the story sometimes takes a leap of faith (like Marshall and Lily jumping out of the window), but this was just stupid.
Not a great episode at all. Part of the draw of this show is that these people are such good friends. I, for one, am not that interested in watching them fight and bicker to the level that they did in this ep.
Not a great episode overall, but for me, the biggest disappointment was that nothing was revealed in the “one year later” coda, which they usually use to tease some future development (Lily and Marshall getting married, Robin moving in with Ted). It might just be me, but I really hope that we see Ted and the mother building a relationship, rather than just them meeting and the series ending. So I’m getting pretty impatient with all these girls who we know won’t work out, given all that we know. When the “one year later” text came up, I was hoping for something hinting that Ted and the mother were together – Lily commenting that Ted didn’t bring the random skank he’s dating, or Ted saying she couldn’t make it. Give me SOMETHING!