60: How I Met Your Mother

I have a great love/hate relationship with How I Met Your Mother - which sits around here on the clist, because it has a little bit of each of my arbitrary criteria, but not a lot - it's kind of popular, it's kind of critically liked, it's kind of notable pop-culture wise, and and I kind of like it.

How I Met Your Mother is a retro-sitcom in some ways - when all the cool kids (and most of the better shows) are going to single camera sitcoms without laugh tracks, How I Met Your Mother has the courage to be multiple camera and with a laugh track. While it's not quite Two and a Half Men, it's far more like a traditional sitcom than just about any show I've regularly watched in the last decade or so.

There are several very distinctive How I Met Your Mother-isms. There's a running gimmick where they'll all be sitting at the bar and someone will say something and the gang will go around each making a remark while they all laugh at each other. Also, How I Met Your Mother tries desperately to produce, well, I don't really have a good word for it - we'll say "things (it means absolutely written down but something one (me) would say in conversation - examples - "is that a thing?", "I didn't know that was a thing") - terms and quotes that people who are watching might repeat in conversation. I'll explain what I mean. In one episode, some guy goes on a date with Robin and gets her to sleep with him by getting naked when she goes to the bathroom - something he calls the "Naked Man." The characters say "naked man" at least a dozen more times in the episode. There's another episode based around the concept, that when someone tells someone about another character's annoying habit, they had never noticed before, a sound like glass breaking goes off in their head, and they can't help noticing it from then on. Many of the gimmicks revolve around Barney, played by Neil Patrick Harris, who, I would not be writing a fair entry about the show, if I didn't mention is by far the best part of the show. Such gimmicks include the "crazy/hot scale" in which to go out with a girl who is crazy, she has to be at least as hot as she is crazy, and the "lemon law," a principle by which you can walk out during the first five minutes of a day. There's at least 10 more similar ploys which are repeated and over and over through episodes.

I've complained about the show a lot to my friends who love it, and I could on for a while, but I'll make it short. The gimmick is terrible - in my mind, it both kills of a lot of the tension when you learn that certain characters aren't his mother, and the weakest part of the show, albeit a minor part is the narration and the flashforward sequences (well I guess the actual time sequences if the show is just a flashback, but easier to think about this way) with Bob Saget talking to his kids, which they have mostly gotten rid of (of course there is still the question of why Ted would have a different voice 20 years in the future). The narration and the show is also filled with all these life-lessons which I hate - if the show wants to impart a message it can do it through
Anyway, I can go on for a while, and my criticism might sound really nit-picky but it's the kind of little things that can drive me up a wall.

It's a funny show - it just irritates me because I think it could be a better show, and it will have to top out as being good, and never great.