Never mind, didn’t fully read post.
I’m glad I ran through the entire series multiple times before I lost it. My sister watched the show a year or two ago, and seeing how highly that episode was rated, was disappointed she missed it. I suggested, and she considered, paying the three bucks to get it from youtube. I don’t think she ever did, I’ll have to see if she has Amazon Prime now that I know it’s there.
Yeah, neither Barney nor Howard is held up as anyone to be emulated. Barney’s set up initially as a sort of caricature of the stereotypical Wall Street/financial industry type- lots of money, very well dressed, somewhat predatory toward women, etc… Howard is set up as the classic creepy horny nerd- he’s short, weird, clueless in multiple ways (clothing, how to talk to women, etc…) but relentless in his horndog attitudes regardless.
Both characters grow/are revealed to be more than that over the course of the shows. Barney turns out to have a very loyal and generous side, especially with his friends, and he’s shown to be surprisingly ethical with relation to women when he’s presented with the opportunity. And he ends up moving from relentlessly single to married and a father. His “origin story” is also shown, which gives him a bit of sympathy as well.
Again, I’m not sure how much of that early characterization was unreliable narrator Ted embellishing him for dramatic effect to heighten the contrast of his transformation or how much was the writers just tweaking things because early Barney was a bit extra, even for that era.
Howard eventually catches a bit of a clue, and manages to somehow woo Bernadette, who further grinds off the rough edges. He was always a nerd, but he wasn’t a creep the whole time.
I’d argue that those two characters do the MOST character development of any of the characters in their respective shows, unlike the primary protagonists, who basically are who the show swirls around, but they don’t change a whole lot.
Howard got engaged to Bernadette late in season 4, and they married at the end of season 5. By that time he had basically left the relentless horndog persona behind. He even has a whole speech shortly before getting married about how he’s disgusted by the guy he used to be, and “that guy” doesn’t exist anymore. He may have been lazy when it came to housework, but he was generally a devoted husband.
Given that the show ran 12 seasons, he was a decent, if geeky, guy for longer than he was a creepy horndog.
To tell the truth, as exaggerated as Barney seems, I’m not sure he’s terribly more extreme than the others: Marshall just falling into high paying law jobs; Ted getting commissions to design major buildings; all these people staying employed despite spending hours daily in a bar…
I find it challenging to try to figure out which aspects I am supposed to accept, and which I ought to reject. And if the characters have no basis in anything resembling reality, then I have limited interest. (One reason I’m not big into all of the comic book movies/shows).
Oh, I think he was still an utter horndog; it was just that he was, indeed, loyal to Bernadette, so he was just unrelenting in his desire for sex with her.
Though, to be fair, with the exception of Sheldon, all of the main characters in the show were sex-obsessed.
Well, consider the show’s title. That’s pretty much what it was about from the beginning.
Howard was an unsuccessful woman chaser. Barney’s childhood was shown to be a factor in his horn-doggedness, and he eventually (in the final season) grew out of it.
If you want to take aim at a beloved character who really treated women as disposable, there’s always Joey Tribbiani.
I suspect that’s just a subset of the standard sitcom idea that all men want to have sex whenever there’s an opportunity, and those few men who don’t are weird (or have some personal problem that’s weighing on them).
I thought it was an intentional irony that Howard talked a big game when he was constantly being rejected, but immediately settled down with the first woman who would have him.
Leonard, and even Raj (eventually) were the ones who had real success in dating.
That’s the thing. I don’t think the show in any way depicted Barney as despicable. So much of the story has him getting what he wants as long as it involves exploiting women. He’s presented as cool. There’s a reason why people really liked the character, and even some of his ideas (e.g. the crazy/hot axis, cheerleader effect, etc) even entered into the lexicon.
What you’re calling a “redemption arc” is closer to him settling down. He’s treated more like a lovable scamp who has to improve, not like someone who did a bunch of horrible things and must make amends.
I also note that the conceit of the show that these are all exaggerated stories Ted tells his kids makes it worse. It seems pretty clear to me that Ted is making Barney seem cooler than he actually could have been. He’s not, say, taking out the bad stuff he did to make it more palatable, nor is he telling the kids how horrible so many of those things were.
And Barney was pretty beloved in popular culture at the time. Everyone I know loved him. And some of his ideas even took off, like the “hot/crazy scale” or the “cheerleader effect.”
I do think you could make a character like Barney today, but he would clearly be a villain, not friends with the good guys and tolerated or even liked by them. And he would likely not be able to be a main character unless the show was more about a bunch of shitty people at a similar level.
I also don’t think you could do Fonzie today, but I do think Fonzie ages better due to making it more about smooching and not showing Fonzie ever being deceptive.
In sitcom parlance, Laura Petrie is an “ear” – a person who’s really only there to give the star someone to talk to. The gave Laura more stuff to do as they realized how talented and appealing Mary Tyler Moore was, but I don’t think she ever fully escaped being a plot device.
I think the main deal with Howard is that he was a spoiled, cosseted man-child, and the horndog thing was really just the most prominent aspect of this.
As for HIMYM, I haven’t watched much of it, but Barney’s character always struck me as a 90s version of Night Court’s Dan Fielding. Now there is a character who would not fly today.
Thing is, we don’t have to have a debate about whether or not Marshall was a rapist or sexual predator. Sure, he seems a bit exaggerated, but he’s not evil. Ted does actually seem to be more of a good guy with foibles.
As for them getting what they want in life: that’s just the happy ending conceit. That’s present in many happy ending stories, and is especially common in sitcoms that go for the happy laughs and not the cynical laughs. The characters are loved and thought well of, so people want to see good things happen to them. And, of course, the conceit of it being a story Ted tells his kids gives an in-universe excuse for that trope.
And, as I argued above, I think that conceit hurts with Barney.
I don’t know that this is necessarily true. Yes, he often succeeds with women. But he also often fails, many times spectacularly and comically so. He’s very often the butt of the joke.
For example, theres the episode where he brags about having slept with 200 women, and at first the gang, while disgusted, admits that this is a high number; but then Marshall points out that since Barney is constantly trying to score with women, on a daily basis, for years at a time - this is actually not impressive at all, and means he has an abmysally low success rate.
But I do agree that his whole ‘sex through deception’ schtick would be viewed very differently today.
Making such a show today they might be a little more careful about letting Barney’s ‘plays’ appear to possibly be something more than ‘sex by deception’, which is also known as dating. I can’t recall anything in particular that would have to change but I can’t recall everything on the show. However, we are hearing Barney’s stories, which in themselves are considered less than credible, and then being related by Ted years later, in a comedy show where everything is exaggerated for comic effect. No further literary devices are necessary to assume his actions are benign unless otherwise stated.
Steve Stifler (American Pie) would be “similar character”. Quagmire from Family Guy would be another. Also Vince Vaugn’s character in Swingers or Van Wilder (or pretty much every Ryan Reynolds character).
Possibly Joey Tribiani from Friends. Although he didn’t have much in the way of elaborate schemes. Mostly he just smiled and said “How you doin’?” and women naturally responded.
I think maybe it’s not so much that the character is no longer acceptable or funny. It might be that it’s less acceptable or funny to portray women as the sort of clueless vapid bimbos that sleep with these sort of characters?
Then again, Peter Quil AKA Star Lord is a fairly recent character who was initially portrayed as the same sort of womanizing d-bag. As was Tony Stark and Thor. Then again, Guardians of the Galaxy was released in 2014, the same year HIMYM ended.
Have you ever actually spent time in New York City? The bars and clubs are full of 20- and 30-somethings just getting off work at their high paying jobs in law, finance, tech, and other industries.
The characters and situations are obviously highly exaggerated for the show, But I wouldn’t say they are particularly unrealistic.
So, then this is a more specific part of the issue. That it’s not just Barney’s portrayal itself, it’s having “good people” in-universe befriending Barney.
ISTM that to many people such a character as Barney or others mentioned, if depicted, must only be depicted in order to unequivocally condemn. And within that, there then is a specific case objection to seeing in-universe-“good” characters not reject and ostracize that character – part of the whole conceit is that they do keep this person as a friend. So the “sensitive” issue is not Barney being Barney, but why do the putatively good others go along with it.
Stifler wasn’t actually ever successful in the movies from what I recall. He was essentially a hypermasculine lunatic and instigator. A different sort of teenage/young adult male archetype.
I guess where I’m having a problem is where we draw the line. I mean, as I recall, Joey Tribiani wasn’t ever portrayed as predatory, just someone who women liked and who slept around a lot. Nothing particularly despicable there. Quagmire was absolutely NEVER a “cool” character, and Van Wilder was more in the Joey mold than the Barney Stinson mold- it’s been a while since I saw it, but his whole deal was that he was so cool that he got laid without having to try, just like Joey.
Just being a womanizer/man-slut isn’t particularly bad; if it’s consensual and there’s no deception, who cares?
I still maintain that the real Barney was exaggerated for comic effect by Ted, and his exploits were similarly embellished.
In particular, it’s that I think anything else would be read as the creators/writers actually support that sort of thing.
Though, to me, it’s not just the befriending. I still say Barney was presented as cool. Even when they do have him face consequences, it tends to be small things he can just ignore. He just isn’t treated as being all that different in morality than the rest of the cast, when he clearly is.
Sure, the conceit of the show is that this is because Ted is most likely exaggerating. The “real” Barney didn’t do all these things. But, as I said, that just makes it worse because he’s telling this to his kids, teaching them that what Barney did wasn’t so bad.
In this post-#MeToo era, I don’t see how the way Barney is depicted here wouldn’t be seen as treating rape culture as a joke. And the whole movement is about not minimizing that sort of thing anymore.
Yeah, I’ve lost the thread here.
None of this has anything to do with MeToo. It’s not assault or harassment.
Fonzie is mentioned upthread. Anyone want to specify what’s objectionable here? That he could snap his fingers, and I don’t think he was portrayed as being commanding, just signaling, and have a woman on his arm? He wasn’t harassing anyone, he didn’t need to. What is the objection? Are the women being tricked? Doesn’t seem like it, Fonzie was represented as being the coolest man on the show. Do the women enjoy Fonzie’s company? Seems like they do. Are the “concerned” viewers of today really concerned that Fonzie and his female partners might actually have had sex? I don’t think that’s their objection either. It seems to be an objection to Fonzie’s existence itself and resentment of his implied power. Everyone’s happy in that world, but they still don’t like it.
It was the same way with Wilt Chamberlain and the “scandalous” mention in his book about the number of women he had slept with. Again here, Wilt was an extremely exceptional man in a positive sense, and again, I really do think all of those women genuinely wanted to have sex with him and found the experience worthwhile. Yet this was objected to without the complainers really having a case about anything specific that happened. The complainers don’t really care about the casual sex or the promiscuity, they have no case about the women being fooled or tricked or getting a bad bargain, they care about the implied power.