Kind of inspired by this thread (and because it’s free on Amazon Prime), I’ve started rewatching episodes of How I Met Your Mother.
Everyone kind of goes on about Barney’s outlandish behavior and treats Ted as the “nice guy”, but holy crap is Ted so much worse!
Just in the first half-dozen episodes of Season 1, we see Ted:
Come on way too strong on a first date after just meting Robin.
Return to Robin’s apartment late at night after she had already indicated things weren’t going to happen.
Sets up three days of parties just to “bump into her” so he can pretend to have casual feelings for Robin.
Continues to pursue Robin after she has clearly expressed she isn’t interested in a serious relationship.
Begs a girl he broke up with by voice message on her birthday to get back with him so he can see if his feelings have changed.
Breaks up with the same girl again (on her birthday).
Spends every Halloween waiting to run into some girl he once met at a party in the off chance she might return to the same rooftop party.
Steels the profile of a girl he might be a match with so he can track her down, pretend to be a patient, and then pursues her romantically after she indicates she is engaged.
I only watched the show sporadically before, so I didn’t actually realize how actually creepy Ted is. There is an obsessive sense of entitlement about him. Like because he is the “nice guy”, once he sets his sights on a “soul mate” (which seems to happen every episode), whatever he does is ok. And he’s willing to wait until “she comes around” or “the time is right” or whatever.
And that, kids, is how I met your mother…whose frozen head you can find in the freezer next to the others who didn’t work out.
What’s more, the entire story is told from Ted’s POV and he’s canonically an unreliable narrator so the depiction in the show is him putting himself in his best light.
Ted is by far the worse character. Barney is an obvious satire of a “Make-Out King” (and all the more amusing that he’s played by a gay man) and is otherwise absurdist in both his actions and vocation (“Please!”) but the audience is clearly intended to sympathize with Ted even though, as the o.p. notes, he’s an obsessive stalker who ends up telling a protracted shaggy dog story to his kids just so he can get their approval to hook up with their ‘Aunt’ Robin.
And then there Lily and Marshall who are just the worst fucking people. I don’t even have the words to describe how truly awful and insipid they are; it’s like someone watched “Mad About You” and tried to figure out how to make a couple that was even more narcissistic and oblivious. The only intelligent and genuine character on the show is Robin, and if she’s spending all of her time hanging out with these people what the hell is wrong with her?
Awful people, everyone of them. Notice how no one else wants to hang out with any of them for very long? Same dynamic as It’s Always Sunny, the characters are stuck with each other because no one else wants to be around them. Ensemble casts tend to degrade into that mode. But it’s also just an exaggeration of the kinds of flaws people have and the mistakes they make in life. We all imagine ourselves as being better people than we are, but our friends know the truth.
I think that’s somewhat of a product of “3-6 young people living in the city” ensemble shows. Because it’s the same cast for the 5-10+ year run of the show, it can seem weird how close they are in each others’ lives, how they never seem to really grow as people, or why at least one couple maintains a “will they/won’t they?” “on again/off again” relationship for the entire run of the show.
Shows like HIMYM, Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City, Girls, and so on are very stylized, comedic portrayals of the lives of people in their 20s and 30s living in New York City. Or perhaps more accurately, people in their 20s and 30s who make enough money to afford (or otherwise acquire) a nice Manhattan apartment and can go drinking and clubbing and eating in restaurants every other night. They are basically like stories I would tell about stuff my friends and I did when I was that age living in NY (if I had better writers). Which is what the show literally is from Ted’s perspective.
And which makes it more disturbing. Because it’s all “here’s where I did this awful thing…but it’s ok because I was in love and felt she might be my soul mate!”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m finishing up the episode where Ted gets blackout drunk and wakes up with a strange woman in his bed next to a pineapple.
In another context this would be the opening to a late ‘Nineties thriller starring Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman, or an indie Godfather parody. Either way, it would be more watchable than How I Met Your Mother, which would have been fine as a 10-18 episode single run series but wears out its welcome long before it gets anywhere near resolving its premise, and then keeps rolling despite being out of runway or indeed solid land.
Similar to the other series I mentioned or the American Pie films, the entire premise is an extended adolescence for the main characters. Basically a reoccurring theme that started in the 90s where being a “functional adult” in the traditional sense of career, family, etc is undesirable or unobtainable (to people living in one of the most expensive cities in the world). So instead they create a surrogate family of their close friends and every week we get to see them continue antics they probably should have grown out of at most a year or two after college.
At least we see Marshall and Lilly building a life together over the course of the show. The premise that a young, successful, attractive architect like Ted Mosley can’t find anyone suitable to settle down with in New York City over the course of an entire decade is a bit unrealistic (aside from that Ted is unreasonably picky and fixated on Robin).
And really, I don’t find the love triangle between Robin, Ted, and Barney romantic. I find it creepy. Ted asked Robin out . She said “no” because she didn’t want to settle down. it wasn’t “bad timing” because one of them was married, traveling for work, joining the Navy or whatever. It just became this weird co-dependent thing where Ted sort of became this safe bet if things didn’t work out. And then when Barney started to mature, Robin became this safe bet as the only attractive woman who would put up with his nonsense.
The Robin and Barney relationship is completely manufactured to create some kind of new complication in the show without having the bring in new characters. It makes no sense and doesn’t work on any level, notwithstanding the self-martyrism of Ted in abetting it for…reasons?
Honestly, I started watching the show because it was recommended to me by someone who assured me that it was really deep and interesting, and finished it because I am obsessive about being a completionist even if it is about driving nails through my toes, but I found the show to be a gawd-awful mess of dumb tropes, poor attempts at lampshading, inconsistent characterization, and ultimately stretching an already thin premise out to well beyond any rational measure. It mostly convinced me that I was generally correct in generally avoiding sitcoms that don’t start John Cleese or Ricky Gervais (Parks & Rec being a notable exception and even it wore out its welcome and coasted mostly on the personalities of Nick Offerman, Aubrey Plaza, and Chris Pratt in later series). So, maybe I’m not actually the best critic of the the show and sitcoms in general, but the biggest problem of the show was the characters who were all mostly insufferable, and since the character developments essentially drive the show nothing about it really works, but especially Ted for the reasons that you identifty.
Um, no… the main character’s name is Barney. That’s why it was called The Barney Show. Who is this Moosebley character you are talking about? And who was that annoying old boring couple that was always hanging around?
I watched the show because I frequently found the jokes funny.
I never understood the Ted & Robin thing, because I never got any chemistry between them. I don’t know if that was an acting, writing, or me problem. For Ted (and Barney) it seemed like he’d dated a bunch of women, none of the relationships worked out, and Robin is a woman, so it’s time to try dating her.
Maybe the problem was Ted had so many women he’d been madly in love with, that by the time he got to Robin, I didn’t buy him being madly in love.
I think the problem was he fell madly in love with Robin in the very first episode. But unlike every other woman Ted fell madly in love with, Robin continued to stick around.
I don’t think it was so much a TV trope, as a reflection of how life actually was for a lot of people in that era. At least in my experience from about 25-32, that’s how it worked for most everyone I knew. We’d all sort of banded together in social groups who did most of the social interaction together. They weren’t exclusive though- I was part of two of them. Lots of drinking, dumb-ass shenanigans, etc… but surprisingly a lot less dating and sex than you might think. Mostly because we already knew each other I suspect.
Where the TV shows get it wrong IMO is in the closeness, size, and exclusivity of the groups. Ours were always about a dozen “core” people in each group who tended to do most of the stuff together, and another 10 or so part-timers who might show up to stuff half the time. And even within that core dozen, they weren’t all close like that- you’d have people who were closer to each other than the group as a whole, but it wasn’t quite TV-style joined at the hip for everyone. Some people were very close, and others were friendly, but not close, even in the core groups.
And still is, tbh. Young adults are still delaying marriage and starting a family later.
I don’t really have a size with the size of the group, but generally there would be people moving in and out of the group at various points of time. They did do a little of that, with Robin joining the original group (of Ted, Marshall & Lilly, and Barney) and then various significant others joining the group for a little while. However, there probably should have been more ‘part-timers’ as you say - and those who may spend a lot of time being super friendly at the bar, but then never hang out with them outside of it.
There was Stuart who they were moderately close with, and maybe one or two others.
A lot of television shows have a college-like lifestyle for the main characters even though it doesn’t make sense, so you have shows with high school students who spend most of their time hanging out with their friends on college-like campuses that are supposedly high schools, and shows like HIMYM with post-college people spending all their time with a small group of same-aged friends, as if they are still in an environment where people outside the age range of 17-24 barely exist.
Ensemble shows use the ‘new person’ as a plot point often but they can’t escape the detailed characters they developed around the interchange within the group. The ‘new person’ doesn’t hang around if they get treated the way the members of the group treat each other. Familiarity breeds something or another, or so I’ve heard. So the shows will concentrate on the easy to produce in-jokes of the ensemble. HIMYM used that White House staff member guy to play a psychologist who falls in love with Robin. He also does a searing analysis of the groups structure and their unhealthy dependency on each other. Can’t find the scene by itself, but he nails them.