How I came to hate How I Met Your Mother

Imagine you’re Ted’s kids. Your dad is telling you the story of how he met your mother. Over 50 hours later (so far) you still have no idea, and if anything you’re even more confused than before he started. You’ve also been wearing the same clothes through the entire story (except for the first 20 minutes), implying that he’s keeping you there against your will, forced to sit still for 50 hours, never allowed to move or sleep or eat. Actually this is the year 2030, maybe we’ve stopped needing food. The point is, I feel their pain.

There was a time when the prospect of watching How I Met Your Mother was an exciting one. It had great characters, an interesting Coupling-style narrative, and — most importantly of all — it was funny. It could be that my taste has changed; since then I have discovered shows like 30 Rock and Community, both of which make HIMYM look about as funny as an abortion. Or it could be that HIMYM has actually got bad. To be honest, it’s a bit of both, but let’s look at the latter.

Looking back through a red haze, it seems that everything started to go wrong last season (season 97?). Particularly when Marshall’s dad died. Because Marshall is such a likeable character, his being upset did make me sad. At first. Then this was dragged out over about 80 episodes, and the sadder Marshall got, the angrier I got. Yes grief is a long and painful process, but this isn’t HBO, it’s a sitcom; I don’t watch it for its realism.

Look at Friends, one of HIMYM‘s most obvious influences. Remember when Phoebe’s grandmother died? Exactly, me neither. Because it only took up one episode. “The One Where Phoebe’s Grandmother Dies”, presumably. Shouting “stop whining Marshall, no one cares!” at the television may sound harsh, but HIMYM has become a big wet pile of sentimentality.

Meanwhile Barney started pining for his own father, who (spoiler alert) turned out to be John Lithgow, which terrified all Dexter fans and made us think Barney was going to be killed in a bath. Anyway, presumably Carter Bays and Craig Thomas thought there should suddenly be some character development for both him and Marshall. But this was to seriously misunderstand their own character; Barney did have depth; we understood that his shallow bravado was a shield protecting a man with real insecurities. But the writers thought the audience were too stupid to get that, so they abandoned all subtlety and subtext, in the process turning one of the funniest comedy characters ever into a boring mawkish piece of boring.

Oh and he met Nora. It is always difficult to like peripheral characters, infiltrating our beloved circle of main characters. Especially when they’re as annoying, badly written and appallingly acted as Nora. I’ve written about the pain of English characters in American TV shows before, and Nazanin Boniadi is the worst. There was a wonderful moment in this week’s episode after Barney revealed (spoiler alert) that he’d cheated on her, to which Boniadi responded, “I don’t even know how to react.” We know you don’t.

Perhaps she’s deliberately unlikeable, so we wish Barney would leave her for Robin. But Robin is not much better. As a character she is difficult to care about, being relentlessly arrogant. At least Cobie Smulders can act and isn’t English. But also this week, Robin kept asking, “Why do you even like me?” Good question.

Talking of this week’s episode, there was a “serious” storyline (Barney and Robin) and a “funny” storyline (Ted and Marshall). This is just lazy. Good comedy writing will tackle serious issues using comedy. That’s also what made the Marshall’s dad plot so awful that there were just no laughs. In a comedy. Incorporate comedy into the serious bits, rather than rigidly separating the two. Again we’re being patronised; here is a serious bit, here is a funny bit.

While we’re on structure, I compared HIMYM to Coupling earlier; the way each episode was built around a series of flashbacks made me love HIMYM as an American Coupling, in which Steven Moffat had masterfully used this narrative technique. There was already an actual American Coupling but it failed impressively. Anyway, this structure has lapsed in HIMYM; of course each episode is still a flashback, but there are rarely the flashbacks within each story that once made it so interesting. Each story would unravel using a series of memories, but now each episode tends to be boringly linear. Again, the writers seem to be getting lazy.

So why, given that it hasn’t made me laugh for over a year, do I still watch HIMYM? Self-harm aside, it’s because I want to know who the mother is. But do I really care at this point? Either it’s someone we haven’t met yet, in which case I don’t care, or it’s someone minor who we have met, in which case I don’t care. In fact the only interesting conclusion would be if it turned out that Lily is the mother. Either that or this whole thing is just a very elaborate way for Ted to tell his kids that they’re adopted. Which, given his Josef Fritzl-style abuse of them so far, isn’t beyond him.

Clacked by Dan Meier
on Nov 17, 2011 @ 14:52 EST5EDT