3/24/08: How I Met Your Mother (2005-present)
Check out that pic, and roll your eyes at what looks like the most annoying
Friends knock-off ever. It isn’t one, though. That’s our second point. Our first point is: good riddance to
Jericho. We didn’t trust that show from the start. No surprise to see that the producers—forced to wrap things up after dodging cancellation—sold out the show’s fanbase with a storyline where evil neo-conservatives nuked the American heartland. Some people still defend
Jericho as being Libertarian, and they might have a point. In NYC, the Libertarian Party mostly stands for defending the right to use the drugs that we’d need to get through an episode of
Jericho.
Meanwhile,
How I Met Your Mother has gone unheralded—probably because it’s not likely a conservative would tune in to CBS for an annoying
Friends knock-off. We weren’t planning to, but the first season got our attention with the character of Robin Scherbatsky. The first episode we ever saw was about the lovably awkward Ted discovering that his new love interest really loves her firearms. We kind of regretted that the sitcom was funny, since we were expecting the episode to end with Robin learning a lesson about the evils of the Second Amendment.
Instead, Robin was being established as one of the show’s more rational characters. The other two are Marshall and Aldrin, a young couple whose engagement inspired Ted to start looking for his own wife. (In what’s become a forced conceit, Ted narrates the show from the year 2030, explaining to his kids how he met their mother.) Too bad for Ted that Robin—as an intelligent New York City news reporter—is clearly a fictional character.
We’re not particularly loyal viewers, but we’ve never seen a bad or insulting episode. It didn’t even bother us when Marshall and Aldrin broke up for a while. Things played out in a realistic manner. We’re more irritated that the show’s only been getting attention recently because of a Britney Spears cameo in tonight’s episode.
Before that, the show’s press has mostly been generated by Neil Patrick Harris as the womanizing and ruthless Barney. He’s a uniquely lovable businessman by TV standards. This brings us to our favorite episode of
How I Met Your Mother. “Game Night” was from the first season, and provides Barney’s backstory. We see young Barney as an earnest hippie working at a coffee shop with his girlfriend while they plan to join the Peace Corps—but that changes once his gal dumps him for an obnoxious businessman.
Broken-hearted Barney writes some bad love songs and wanders the streets and probably plays a few mournful games of hacky sack. Then he comes across a suit sale. That’s when Barney chooses reinvention. The punch line to this episode is that Barney recounts this tale of woe shortly after getting the chance to reunite with his lost love—which he did, but he forgot to tell her that it was strictly a booty call. Also, Barney only tells his sad story to his friends after they each agree to share their own most embarrassing moments. Then he has a good laugh at them thinking that Barney could possibly be sad over dodging the bullet that would’ve dealt him the fatal blow of ending up as a loyal Leftist.
The very best thing is that a few episodes earlier, Barney scored with a gullible gal at a wedding by telling her that he was about to join the Peace Corps. The show’s full of those clever touches.
Make it your own: This may be a fannish post, but
How I Met Your Mother certainly deserves some attention. Give the show a shot—even if we’ve probably missed a few episodes that had some kind of Leftist content. We’re almost positive that
the first season was pretty much perfect. And, as noted, tonight’s that episode with Britney Spears guesting, so you can watch intelligent television and still enjoy feeling stupid. That’s 8:30 pm EST.
