In HIMYM the whole premise is that Ted is telling his kids this story. As he tells the story he embellishes parts of it. Either for effect or poor memory. There is a kernel of truth the stories are generated from but they are made much more interesting than they really were. Hence, the unreliable narrator.
Kinda like telling your buddies a fish-that-got-away story in the pub. Each time you tell it the fish is bigger than it ever was and the battle to land it was more epic than it really was. But there is some truth. You did go fishing. Only it was a perch you almost caught, it ate your worm and got away.
I am not sure I see that in Always Sunny or Seinfeld. Who is the narrator in those shows?
Also, if he’s not in a scene, at best he’s relaying second hand information to us, at worst, the entire scene is a fabrication. IIRC, one episode actually had scenes that were blatantly falsified for comedic effect.
Charlie (and to a lesser extent) Alan on Two and a Half Men. Also, after they killed off Charlie and were trying to find a replacement for him, they brought on his ‘long lost daughter’ who was essentially a female version of him.
Well Quagmire seems to be Barney’s cartoon equivalent, and the writers of that show have toned down his behavior significantly.
And we got to see that in real time since the show has not been canceled yet. I think that’s what would have happened to Barney if HIMYM were still a thing today.
Yeah - Charlie on 2 1/2 Men is a good example. Also a few years old, tho. And I guess Klink/Shultz in Hogan’s Heroes tried to pull off the Idea of lovable Nazis.
We recently listened to Huck Finn, and were able to discuss it in terms of today’s views of race relations and language. I feel a little more conflicted WRT a character like Barney and women’s rights/issues. I have noticed personal difficulty with historically “lovable” characters like Dick Van Dyke’s Rob Petrie. What a dick!
True, but that’s because he was telling the story to his kids and didn’t want to say ‘so, Marshall and I went to a hockey game and got really, really high’. I don’t think that was an unreliable narrator thing. At least not to the viewing audience (the kids maybe, but not us).
Nope, missed a major point in the show. The Nazis were always evil. Klink was a regular Luftwaffe officer and pretty incompetent, but not a Nazi. Shultz not only wasn’t a Nazi, but seemed to be stealthily anti-Nazi. He made jokes indicating he actually did know and realize quite well he was often aiding and abetting the Allied Prisoners.
Apparently Shultz was a WWI vet that was running a very successful Toy Factory that the Nazis took over and converted for the War Effort.
I’m pretty sure if Hogan’s had gotten the last season they were told they would get, there probably would have been a show near the end where the Heroes rescued Shultz from the SS or something similar.
Every regular German on the show was played by a European Jew that had escaped Europe ahead of the Nazis. They made sure the Nazis were always shown in very bad light.
Look at it this way; it’s not Ted Mosby writing an academic work on what happened among his friend group some 25 years ago, it’s Ted Mosby telling stories to his children to entertain them and tell the story of how he met their mother. And the show is showing what Ted is telling his children, not what actually happened. In fact, it’s not even clear if we’re hearing Ted’s recounting of the tales, or how the kids are interpreting Ted’s tales.
So between the quarter century of elapsed time and Ted’s intent to entertain his kids by the telling of these tales, there’s a lot of room for stuff like “Barney NEVER took a bad photo” to be embellished into what we see in the show. It’s not a literal supernatural phenomenon; but future-Ted may have described it like that for grins. Or maybe the kids interpreted it that way, if you take the tack that we’re seeing what they’re imagining.
Either way, what we saw in the show was the tale being told, not the actual events themselves.
In addition to what bump said, Ted being an unreliable narrator is, at least in part, the premise of the entire show. In fact, even one of the creators has stated that Ted is unreliable “since he is trying to tell a story that happened over 20 years earlier”
This is an interesting example. 30 Rock pulled an episode from syndication because of a character in blackface. But IIRC, it was made pretty clear in the episode that what the character was doing was unacceptable.
Fictional characters do things that are unacceptable IRL all the time, yet certain real-life unacceptable things are unacceptable even in fiction.
The line always seems to be moving and not clearly defined.
If I can add to characters that I never understood how he was acceptable, much less beloved, is Ralph Kramden. Perhaps it was because I witnessed so much domestic abuse as a child, but I HATED Ralph and would switch channels immediately after cartoons so I wouldn’t have to even look at him.
He was constantly threatening to beat up his wife-- actually shaking is fist in her face! I remember as a child wanting to grow up and be big and strong so that I could save Alice (and my abused aunt). I was about 7 at the time, so maybe kids see these characters a bit differently.
They pulled two IIRC. The live episode(s) with that Honeymooners type sequence and the one where Jenna and Tracy switch races (so Tracy was doing white face).
Community pulled, what’s often considered, one of their best episodes, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. For doing blackface, that wasn’t really blackface and was acknowledged, in the episode, that it was both offensive (for being blackface) and not blackface.
Does that even make sense? Everyone that’s seen the episode knows what I’m talking about.
Not just horrible people, horrible people that had lots of really casual sex. Same with Frasier and his derogatory treatment and casual cruelty towards women that weren’t attractive.
Seriously, I’ve been watching lots of ‘90’s sitcoms lately and I see a lot of stuff that wouldn’t escape criticism today. News Radio, with its comic “A story” line about the young reporter who starts sleeping with her boss a few days after she meets him. Or the sex life of 16 year old Lily on Grounded For Life. I was sort of thinking of starting a thread on it when this one popped up.
It isn’t so much the subject matter per se, but the totally light-hearted non-serious approach. I think the pendulum has swung back in the other direction.
Then again, I don’t watch a lot of current TV, so my viewpoint might be skewed.
It always seemed to me that Alice was the one in control. Ralph would bloviate and storm around a lot but Alice was running the home. I do not remember Alice ever being fearful of Ralph. I think it was Ralph who was fearful of incurring Alice’s wrath (not physical).
Indeed, I think it is a sitcom trope to have a buffoon husband and the wife is the only one grounded in reality and running things. (A notable exception being “I Love Lucy”)
(It should be said I have not seen “The Honeymooners” in well over 30 years so I may be misremembering things.)
That’s seeing it from an adult’s point of view. A little kid – with a relative in an abusive situation – would react differently. I still remember things occasionally that I now know I misinterpretted when I was a kid that I see in another light now.
No, you’re right. Alice never cringed or looked scared or did anything but roll her eyes when Ralph would get started. It was comically obvious that Ralph would never do a thing and Alice was never afraid (much less getting abused off screen)
Of course, the joke of a husband regularly (even if impotently) threatening to strike his wife would never go over today.
