Because it was suggested in this thread that you cannot have such a character in a show today (not even Fonzie).
I don’t think this is acceptable. But that wouldn’t have been acceptable 2000 years ago either. It’s covered under adultery, and that sort of thing is reprehensible from either gender.
If anything, a PUA is going to use enlightenment as a fig leaf (“She’s not your property!!!”) to weaken the cause for marriage, but that’s what they do. If Barney went there, I’m surprised there was no payback for that whenever the show aired.
It is acceptable for a sitcom to make such a joke. Isn’t that what we’re talking about, or did you assume sitcoms were reality? If someone did that in real life I’d consider them pathetic and deserving of what happens to them. Only more pathetic would be a woman who has sex with someone who tried such a stupid stunt. And as I recall it didn’t work out so well for Barney.
See my post above, Barney is definitely an asshole. That doesn’t make him a serial rapist, it doesn’t make the jokes unacceptable. You are not supposed to assume that sitcoms are showing reality, and you’re not supposed to act in real life the way people do on sitcoms.
To be totally fair, Babale’s earlier point in a response to me is very valid: the character and the plots around the character would probably not be created the same today. But it is plausible that a good, competent writing staff could write “a Barney for the 2020s”. Would not be exactly the same but that much would have to be expected.
What do you mean by “cannot”? Will you be taken away by the Woke Police and thrown in Woke Gulag in deepest Wokberia? No, not at all. You totally CAN have your hero behave in that way. Are audiences likely to react as positively to a character pulling these stunts in a show in 2022 as they were in 2005? I highly doubt it. People are gonna be more critical of that kind of thing, and since most shows have the goal of appealing to people, I think you will find fewer characters like that (as heroes or sympathetic characters at least) nowadays.
Absolutely. I’m just saying that audiences are going to react more negatively to a non-villain character whose schtick is lying to women for sex, so if you keep making that joke about one of your main protagonists, you might find that audiences react negatively to that character.
Or we may find audiences rally to the “wacky asshole” and you are the one disappointed at the public. Nothing surprises me any more.
Exactly. I think a Modern Barney would still have a lot of casual sex with a lot of different women, but he wouldn’t be using deception to accomplish this, and the humor would probably come less from how antagonistic his relationship to the women he sleeps with is and more from the actual personalities of these characters or situations that arise because he’s sleeping around with so many of them.
There have been clear descriptions about how the character has been written to clearly cross the line (@Babale 's snapshot from the related-merch “playbook” being just one, or the line/joke that @Andy_L relates).
Obviously there are differences of opinion here, and I don’t want or need to waste too much more energy debating with people whose minds are made up (as is mine, for sure).
But, it’s bizarre to me that there is such a resistance to viewing or acknowledging the actions of the fictional character Barney as being over the line to dangerous or victimizer (or whatever word you want to use). The entire character is centered around the character trait of “willing to cross the lines that most people would never consider in order to put his penis in someone.”
@Ann_Hedonia you make a point that rings true- none of this is real, and the entire genre is at its core centered around people acting in awful ways, which is why I continue to find this show funny (at least the first handful of seasons). But there’s an ongoing and unresolvable question in the arts about how which fake stories we tell and how we tell them shapes our view of the real world. It’s odd to me to answer “that character does some really bad stuff and probably wouldn’t be written that way in the current climate” with what seems to amount to “lighten up, that’s just how the medium works/worked.”
Tangent: As you suggest, and @Just_Asking_Questions gets at as well, another part of the issue is that in any writing, and certainly the TV sitcom format, supporting characters, extras, and other referenced people are even less “real people” than the main characters. They exist only to fulfill narrative or textual goals. They only experience the actions of the main characters in precisely the way they need to to further the plot/joke/scene. It makes me imagine a horrific Watchmen-esque telling of HIMYM in which Barney is doing the things he does in the show but where there are some actual more real-life long-term consequences and outcomes, for him, his friends, and the women he victimizes.
And @Whack-a-Mole , that’s a strawman defensive response as well. Has anyone here said “ban that TV show!” Or “no cads allowed on TV anymore!” Or “Only sympathetic characters forevermore!”
Do you know what I want my TV landscape to look like? I want it full of lots of different things. And, I’m also willing to think critically and voice critiques and concerns about shows that I like, even as I continue to watch them! It’s possible to enjoy something while still finding pieces of it distasteful. It’s possible to hate something and still be ok with other people consuming it.
But jump to the slippery slope if you want, I suppose.
She does say this to Carlson though and I think she’d obviously yanking his chain as she often does to fluster him. Which isn’t to say that she never did anything with her older dates but I don’t think it’s the intent of the quote.
The joke around Jennifer is that men just lavish her with gifts for basically existing, she’s not really trading her time for toaster ovens and vacation trips. In fact, there’s an episode where she’s giving away appliances to the other WKRP staff at her condo because she just has stacks of the things. She does enjoy the attention and being treated well but doesn’t we don’t see her making demands. She also makes the most at the station by a fair degree and is taking care of herself – she’s not having some rich older man pay for her condo. Also, she seems to legitimately enjoy her dates; we don’t see her shivering and bemoaning the things she needs to do to get a dishwasher. While “rich” is usually on her list of dating criteria, it has to come with being a nice guy she wants to spend the evening with. So I don’t see her as a gold-digger (much less a whore)
On the “sympathy” front, Jennifer grew up poor in West Virginia so I suppose it’s nice to have guys sending a television to her home just because she met them last week at the Gala and they own a chain of appliance stores.
Ok. But I see Barney being portrayed as a villain time and again on the show and in his dealings with everyone. I don’t see how people are missing that. His behavior is not being presented as admirable. He lies about everything to men and to women. We are supposed to see through that and also notice that his scheming fails most of the time. It is a pretty good comic depiction of a ‘friend’ many 20 and 30 somethings actually know.
Has any other character on the show had book sold in real life on Amazon? Not only books sold on Amazon, but books sold on the best way to lie to women to have sex with them.
That does not strike me as being portrayed as a villain.
My own standards are quite a bit higher than Barney’s but then they are higher than most of the characters on the show, and so many more shows as well. As I tried to convey to @Babale, the line I look for is what is acceptable to make a joke about in a sitcom. Fiction is full of unacceptable behavior, and unacceptable behavior can still be funny.
This was a wonderful post and I’d have gladly quoted it in full just to repeat it, but that would be annoying, so I just snipped my favorite part.
Sure, but there’s a line to how bad they’re willing to portray his behavior, right? Like, they’re not going to have him violently assault a woman, then show up for beers with the rest of the cast. He’s behaving badly, but not so badly that the audience finds him repellent. But that can be a fine line, and it moves over time. Ralph threatening to beat Alice worked in the era in which it was made, but a modern sitcom is unlikely* to use casual threats of domestic violence as a running gag anymore, even if the show is otherwise constructed to make it clear that the character would never actually follow through. Society’s attitude on domestic violence has shifted enough that a character who only pretends to be one still feels kind of gross.
(*Caveated, because dark comedy is a thing, but we’re talking network prime time, not a Troma Entertainment.)
I’m not very familiar with HIMYM, so I’m not in a position to say if Barney’s antics would be perceived differently today than when they originally aired, but something that might have come across as “comic bad” twenty years ago can very easily be perceived as “just regular bad” due to changes in societal attitudes.
I feel sorry for someone who buys that book believing those are effective means of having sex with women. You understood it’s a joke right, not a book advocating lying to people?
So you think people bought it going look what a villain this guy is? Because that was most definitely not my experience of how people viewed Barney as someone in my 20s when the show came out. Hell, tons of my friends started using the “Bro Code” as something that was a good idea (and I still hear the “Hot/Crazy” graph used as a tool to evaluate relationships)
Barney is definitely not a villain. He is actually an incredibly sympathetic and sometimes pathetic character when he lets his guard down (or when the gang stumbles past his guard by mistake). The episodes about him finding his black half-brother (and the way he still naively believes every lie his mother ever told him, no matter how innocent he no longer is) are great examples.
I feel sorry for that strawman you butchered here.
He is presented that way at times, but rarely in his quest for sex.
I don’t know what you mean. I don’t find that book supporting the idea that Barney’s plays are noble activity. Anybody who does didn’t get that way from watching the show.