So I have this longstanding grudge against dramas, which boils down to my belief that they’re simply not as nuanced as comedies. Dramas are angst and anguish and high stakes and dramatic music, which, as far as I’m concerned, is exceedingly one-note. Comedies, on the other hand, seem to take care in exploring the full range of human emotion. Yes, they make you laugh, but they also every so often sucker punch you with overwhelming emotion, which is almost more emotionally devestating because, unlike a drama, you are not expecting to actually feel anything watching a sitcom. And, case in point, let’s talk this week’s How I Met Your Mother, because nothing illustrates this concept better than that.
As you may have noticed, I am not Ivey — he’s on a business trip and will be back to doing reviews next week. When he initially sent out an e-mail asking for people to cover his shows, I was unsure if I should take How I Met Your Mother until I saw the killer ending from last week’s episode. If there’s one thing How I Met Your Mother handles well, it’s finding that perfect sitcom balance between heartbreak and hilarity, and I knew that Barney and Robin hooking up again would inevitably lead to a golden follow-up episode. And, I would like to say with no small amount of smugness, I was totally right.
In the hilarity column, we had Marshall and Ted’s completely blitzed quest for nachos. “Eating sandwiches” is one of my favorite recurring How I Met Your Mother gags, because it so perfectly encapsulates what this show, at its best, is. It’s about the early-thirties balance of trying to still act young while realizing you’re suddenly too old to do all the young things you used to do. A lot of my favorite episodes are about this — the intervention episode, for example, or the Murtaugh list — but the sandwich joke is one of the more lighthearted ways the writers have come up with of making Ted and Marshall face their growing pains, because nothing can really be too painful when you’re blitzed out of your mind and trying to get nachos from the lady’s room. (And that security tape of what really happened? Genius touch.)
That sort of lightheartedness was really, really needed to offset the Barney/Robin melodrama. If anyone watching this show doesn’t think those two crazy kids are going to end up together or that the wedding we mysteriously flashed forward to isn’t theirs, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that it totally is. But I also don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that it’s not going to come easy. As Robin noted in the episode, she’s a mess. And it doesn’t matter if Kevin or Barney don’t see her as one, she feels like a mess. She couldn’t possibly have gotten together with Barney and stayed with him because of their backslide, because she’d always carry that feeling of guilt for being a mess enough to cheat on Kevin. I don’t even really care for Robin and Kevin together, and I still melted like butter in a hot pan.)
As for Barney, I think waiting on Robin (while being aware he’s waiting on her) is also a good thing. Sure, you could argue, he already spent an entire season doing that, but that season was less about Robin and more about him reconciling himself to the idea of a long-term relationship. Now that he’s been through the disaster of the first time he dated Robin, and the non-disaster of Nora (which he needed to learn that not all relationships are automatically disasters), he needs time to fall out of love with just the idea of being Grown-Up Barney who can stay with a girl and in love with the idea that it’s not any girl he wants to stay with, it’s Robin. And he was never going to get that jumping straight from Nora to her. Their not getting together yet makes sense, even if everyone wishes it didn’t, and that’s probably the most painful part of it all.
It’s episodes like this that show the true genius of sitcoms and what sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother can be. They unflinchingly look at all of life — the absurdity and humor along with the heartbreak – and somehow cram it all into thirty minutes of television that makes you laugh, cry, and think. (And then laugh and cry some more.)
Notes and Quotes:
Clacked by Julia Hass 
on Nov 15, 2011 @ 14:47 EST5EDT
I just hope Barney doesn’t try and get Nora back. Because at the wedding scene they fast forwarded to, we see Barney all anxious about his choice of “tie”. To me that says Nora was still in his head (if he indeed marries Robin), and with alot of time still left in the season until the big wedding episode, if Nora was gone as of last night for good…why the anxiety?