True, though in HIMYM the characters are in their late 20s when the show starts. For Ted and Marshall it makes sense since they were college buddies who moved to NYC together and Marshall met Lily in college. Though you’d expect some different age ranges at the bar. Like Barney could have been older.
Tx! At least the writers can have them laugh at themselves.
I would like to take the contrarian view here that the show is good but misunderstood and the characters are not horrible people.
Barney is clearly a creep with very serious issues around respecting consent. If the narration is reliable, he probably committed multiple felonies (each episode). But I think we’re supposed to understand that he’s a cartoon, like Pepe Le Pew. Certainly at the beginning of the show, he’s supposed to be pitiable although by the end he’s undergone some limited character growth. I definitely don’t think his character would be written the same way today as our cultural tolerance for that has diminished (thankfully). But I think we can at least understand him in context.
Ted is our protagonist. We see everything through his eyes. On one hand that suggests he’s putting his best foot forward; on the other, he’s clearly presenting himself as a cautionary tale to his children. He is depicted as frequently being insensitive to the feelings of people around him, both in romantic and non-romantic contexts. I think this is intended (again in a very cartoonish way) to represent the lack of social awareness that many of us have as young adults. Older Ted clearly now understands that it’s bad to constantly correct your friends, come on too strong to women, etc. That said, I don’t think we ever really see Ted crossing lines into truly shitty behavior (actually, maybe we do, after 2AM, but they’re pretty clearly called out as him hitting rock bottom).
But what I think everyone misses about the show is that we’re supposed to see that even older Ted is completely wrong about romance. He spends the entire run of the show searching for “the one” even though he is constantly beat over the head with the fact that there is no “the one”. Barney says it most directly: he and Robin don’t have a failed marriage; they had a successful marriage that only lasted a few years. Just because Ted’s marriage to Tracey ended in death, doesn’t automatically make it superior to Robin and Barney’s marriage. Nor is it superior to all the other serious relationships we see Ted go through. Every single one of those was as important to Ted’s life (and the life of his partner) as his eventual marriage to Tracey. Even if he gets back together with Robin at the end, that isn’t going to last forever either. They’re likely to drift apart again because they’re very different people with very different priorities. But hopefully, they’ll enjoy their time together and both be better for the experience (as they were with their past relationships). The show doesn’t make clear in the end whether Ted has learned this lesson, but I think we’re supposed to learn it on his behalf.
I think you put way more thought into this than the writers actually did.
Stranger
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. We started watching it because we often like to finish our days with 30-60 minutes of TV that will make us smile/laugh. HIMYM delivered pretty reliably on that basis thru - I’d say 4 seasons. We just finished S6 - so we are 2/3 of the way thru. The yucks were somewhat less frequent in S5-6 - but still pretty frequent. And the characters were getting a tad long in the tooth for the protracted adolescence. If this rate of decline continues, I doubt we’ll make it to the end.
But there are only so many Seinfeld/Parks and Rec/Community … shows out there. In our opinion, HIMYM (at least the first 4 season or so) held up pretty well. Never watched it consistently when it came out.
I agree that Ted isn’t great, either. But I can’t agree he’s worse than Barney, both due to numbers and severity. Most of the things the OP mentions are moves made in desperation or crassness, not calculated attempts to manipulate. Stealing the profile and tracking someone down is the main exception, as that’s stalker territory, and definitely manipulative. It’s not something Barney would do, but only because Barney sees his sex partners as disposable in a way Ted doesn’t.
There is a sense in which they are two sides of the same coin. Barney is shitty for devaluing women, and Ted is shitty for pursuing “the one” in lieu of everything else. But Barney still winds up on top for me.
And I do want to point out to @epolo that I have never said it was a bad show. Just one that would be difficult to make today given our expectations of how romance and sexuality should be presented. It should be clear to the audience when people do bad things, or else it is seen as promoting them, even if not intentionally.
I agree. The show works best if you imagine it as a cartoon, somewhat untethered from reality. And when I rewatched the whole run a few months ago (I was very bored) it consistently made me laugh out loud every couple of episodes and feel nostalgic for my youth (not that it was anything like theirs).
I just like to point out that people jump all over Ted for being a jerk in his pursuit of “the one” but that, at least in my interpretation, the show gets that. We are supposed to learn that “the one” was a myth all along even if Ted maybe never does.
I think we all realize that the show was a cartoonish look at the behavior of adults. The appalling behavior is what’s seen if you try to map the show onto reality.
And actually all the characters show some growth away from the “college life” style - it’s clear that by the end, the era of hanging out at a bar every night with their bestest friends is over, not because they’re not friends anymore, but because the natural processes of life require that they spend time doing things separately.
In all fairness, my friends and I did act very cartoonish at that age.
Obviously much of the show is exaggerated for television. But as someone who moved to Manhattan when I was around 28, a lot of HIMYM and other “Friends-like group of friends living in NYC shows” ring true for me. At least the core concept of a group of friends living in the city, hanging out in bars a lot and getting into the occasional wacky adventure at 3 in the morning.
And co-workers/classmates; it seemed to me that what would happen is that outside of the “core” group of a dozen or so people, there were always co-workers who’d been invited, as well as classmates from the people in the group who were in some sort of class or other- grad school, continuing professional education (my group had a lot of architects and a few lawyers), sometimes even leisure learning.
I always felt it was TV shorthand- they probably couldn’t afford the budget to focus on 5-6 people, have a larger standing cast of 5-6 more people, and then another 10 or so frequent guest stars just for the sake of making it true to life.
Absolutely. If nothing else, the episode where Barney showed off his pajama suit was absolute proof of that- it was a joke based on Barney always being well dressed and wearing a suit, and Ted (unreliable narrator) took it to the absurd extreme with Barney’s pajamas being in the form of a business suit.
THAT is basically the way Barney’s portrayed, so you can’t really take any of the rest of it too seriously either.
I just watched a few more episodes from Season 1 and wow that got cringeworthy quickly.
It’s the one where Ted wanted to bring Robin as a plus-one to a wedding, except he didn’t “plus one” but he thought he did. After some comedic whatnot…Robin predictably gets called to work on the day of the wedding and …yadda yadda yadda…Ted falls in love with Victoria (a girl whos specifically did not give her last name and who he had to track down like a detective).
The bride even calls Ted out on how he begged her to bring a girl to the wedding and now he wants to track down a different girl he just met.
And of course Robin realizes she has feelings for Ted once she sees him with Victoria. But now also is starting to think that Barney might also be a good match because of their casual attitude.
I guess it goes on like this for nine seasons.
Pretty much, except the characters get even more insufferable as time goes on. At some point, I was hoping one character would be murdered (I won’t say which one but honestly it doesn’t really matter) and the show would turn into a murder procedural shot in docudrama fashion with the other characters as suspects, and go one that way for a series before it turned out that the killer was just the guy across the hall who was sick of all of the drama and rushing around and slap-bets and so forth.
I like the “Ted as an unreliable narrator” hypothesis with the story told through his skewed, romance-filtered lens but it is still problematic that this is fundamentally an overextended shaggy dog story to get his kids’ ‘approval’ to date ‘Aunt’ Robin. Even if you view the show as a subversion of romantic sitcom tropes, it plays out its premise long before the narrative is concluded. Instead of being a counter to saccharine ‘comedies’ like Friends it essentially became a pastiche of it.
Stranger
IIRC, the creators wanted a 5 season arc, but the show became so insanely popular that CBS threw money at them to make more season. And they weren’t going to refuse that, so they did. It does mean that seasons 5-9 feel more filler like. But I’d say they are still well worth watching even if there is a good drop off after season 6. Though a good part of the drop off is that they start moving away from protracted adolescence into being ‘more adult’ and it doesn’t work that well.
Thx.
I guess our expectations from 1/2 hour sitcoms are pretty low, such that even into S7, HIMYM fits the bill for us. Just nice to have characters that - for whatever reason - don’t annoy us, writing that is intelligent enough to have nice connections within and between episodes, and that reliably deliver a few laughs.
We’ve managed to work our way through so sitcoms over the past couple of years. There aren’t that many others which are available on out platforms, that lasted more than a couple of seasons, and that appeal to both of us. It is nice when we stumble upon an older series that has several seasons, each of which had many episodes. Many older comedies just don’t hold up.
Previously we were trying to watch Frasier on discs from the library. My wife liked it better than I - I really didn’t care for either brother.
We just watched the 1st ep of the final season of Grace and Frankie. BOY, did THAT suck!
Maybe we’ll see about taking a turn through Friends…
Very much this. There aren’t a lot of new sitcoms in a similar vein and if you find one you don’t know the characters or the backstories yet, you’ll have to follow through from the beginning to get to the level of familiarity you have with a show that is past it’s prime but easy to watch and follow.
Bumping this thread because I saw this episode for the first time the other day!
I feel like real life Ted Mosby might actually be closer to Chris Kattan’s portrayal of “Jed Mosby” in the movie within the show “The Wedding Bride”.. Barney makes a comment “that’s exactly how it happened!” which we are meant to think reflects Barney’s skewed view of the world. But Barney is shown to be highly perceptive (if somewhat amoral), so I think he might actually not be that far off!
I also like to think that an incredible percentage of Barney’s “success” with women is just Ted buying the bullshit. I mean, think about it, you almost never actually SEE Barney with a woman and there’s little to substantiate Barney’s claim of constant sexual conquest other than his own assertions–but Ted being starstruck by dicklord Barney rings pretty true, I’ve met plenty of guys who live vicariously through their hawt guy friend’s conquests. Watch it with the view that Barney basically NEVER gets laid and it gets even funnier. I also think Barney being played by a well known gay actor takes a lot of the evil out of his shenanigans, I can’t take him seriously as a mega-cocksman at ALL. His relationship with Robin, though, that I can buy and it has a ring of truth to it.
They knew -
Stick with it to the 30 second mark or so . . .