In Memoriam: How I Met Your Mother

As you surely know, if you pay even casual attention to television, CBS aired the series finale of How I Met Your Mother (hereafter, HIMYM) last night. Hundreds of thousands of words have already been written about this series on an expansive set of issues ranging from the academic to the knee-jerk impulsive. That won’t stop me from kicking in my own two cents, of course. Not least because I find myself in disagreement with the majority of internet commentators who suggested that this finale broke from the emotional register of the rest of the show. Jamie Weinman, writing for Maclean’s, even went so far as to write that “life is light and happy in the world of this show; it doesn’t become deeper because of 60 seconds of sadness.” From a certain vantage, one can see his point. On an episode by episode basis, HIMYM was one of the most charming shows on television (for several years it shared this particular crown with NBC’s Parks and Recreation). However, unlike Parks, and really unlike nearly all sitcoms, HIMYM is not primarily an episodic narrative. No single episode is capable of encapsulating it, or even of representing it. At this end of this post I’ve included a list of my top ten episodes, but even that list will be insufficient to express the narrative of the show (what it will really do is give you an eye towards what kind of viewer I am).
But, if HIMYM is not an episodic sitcom, how should we talk about its narrative? Having thought about it, I’d suggest that Barney Stinson most accurately characterized the narrative. We are talking about a legen—wait for it—I’m sorry everyone, I had to, I mean just…had to—dary epic.
There are two important halves here that make up the whole, both deserving of discussion. Is this show a legend? Well, is it a traditional account that is generally regarded as related to history, but with unauthenticated or unreliable details? At its core, we’re watching a man tell his kids about meeting their mom, there is almost no story more traditional then that. Nor is it news to anyone that Ted Mosby is a chronically unreliable narrator (HIMYM was rocking this device way before True Detective made it sexy) whose account of events shouldn’t be taken at face value. But is it an epic? Well, it is a long (approximately 70 hours of total running time) narrative, orally transmitted (at least within the context of the framing device), that focuses on the deeds of its legendary characters. Ted Mosby is, in some sense, like Odysseus narrating his adventures to Alkinous.

So what does that have to do with whether or not the finale broke with the show’s tone? A lot, actually. This has never been a purely “light and happy world.” Ted Mosby’s journey is not unlike that of Dante, whose Comedia Ted is so fond of quoting in the original Tuscan. There are moments that are hellish: Lily and Marshall calling off their engagement at the end of season 1, Ted discovering his parents’ divorce, and ending his initial relationship with Robin in season 2,  Barney betraying Ted’s friendship (and being hit by a bus) in season 3, Ted being left at the altar in season 4, the death of Marshall’s father in season 6, Robin finally deciding that she wants to have children only to discover that she cannot conceive in season 7, Ted finding himself totally alone in the season 8 episode “Time Travelers,” and the whole world is discussing how the series wrapped on Monday. There are moments of great joy: Lily’s pregnancies, Marshall and Lily’s “real” wedding by the tree, Ted’s eventual (if too short-lived) happiness with the mother, Barney’s father giving him words of comfort and hope, Mickey Aldrin’s unexpected emergence as a decent man, Marshall’s discovery of his father’s last words to him. What all of these incidents had in common was that they were all (to some degree) spontaneous changes to a world whose slow developments often had Ted complaining that he was stuck in purgatory.

That is one of the central issues throughout HIMYM’s nine year run. Human beings change slowly (part of the reason characters are constantly doubling back) while life changes quickly. The tension between the long timeframes of personal changes and instantaneous timeframe of life altering changes has driven the narrative from the very beginning. The finale revelation of the mother’s death is not “60 seconds of sadness” in an otherwise bright world. That kind of description would be true if HIMYM were Friends, a show whose total lack of depth becomes apparent with literally each passing second [Sidenote: Greta would like to disagree with this criticism and is happy to defend the lasting comedic value of Friends at any time]. Instead, for nine seasons (and seven very good ones) HIMYM built towards its final point—that life continues in the wake of monumental change, that there is no such thing as an ending, and that only by translating our pains and joys into (legendary) stories will we find the ability to keep on keeping on. Though I have some issues with the finale, it is, on the whole, a fitting end to a top five all time television comedy.

Series Rating: 4/4

My Top Ten HIMYM episodes, in no particular order:
“Okay, Awesome”
“Ted Mosby: Architect”
“The Naked Man”
“Legendaddy”
“Hopeless”
“Bad News/Last Words”
“Time Travelers”
“How Your Mother Met Me”
“How I Met Everyone Else”

 This content appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll