Yes, it took the ending of a beloved television show to get me to post again.
But seriously guys, the series of How I Met Your Mother has really annoyed me.
It didn’t send me into rage spirals like the LOST finale (STILL MAD ABOUT THAT ONE, even though it’s been over for like 4 years already), it didn’t perplex me with its sheer wtf-ery like the Dexter finale (random lumberjacks!) and it didn’t pull the “Oh wait, what – it got canceled six months ago and I didn’t know about it?” crap that the poor The Glades got last year (and the last episode was a cliffhanger! Phooey!).
SPOILERS AHOY
So what the HIMYM finale did was negate an entire series with the last five minutes of the finale. How I Met Your Mother was not, in fact, about meeting the mother. It was about how Ted fell in love with Robin, never got over her, met the mother and had kids, then eventually got back together with Robin after the mother died. This whole time, Ted wasn’t telling stories to the kids about how he met their mom, he was telling them about his life so that he could justify getting back together with Robin several years after losing his wife.
Now generally speaking, had the show not gone on for so long, this could have been perfectly acceptable. It works in books and isn’t uncommon in real life. But the show went on for nine years and the entire last season took place over Robin and Barney’s wedding weekend. Then, in the final episode, they had Robin and Barney get divorced and Barney go back to his philandering ways – which the show had spent YEARS developing Barney into a better person. And the show had spent YEARS developing the idea that Robin and Ted were wrong for each other and that the mother was the love of Ted’s life.
Had the events that took place in the finale took place over the entire final season, I think that would have been much better. HIMYM has proven over the years that while generally a comedy, they can have tough stories lines and go about them in a serious way (Marshall’s dad dying and Robin’s infertility issues) – I actually think they could have done that whole final episode over the final season and those fans who expected Ted to wind up with the mother wouldn’t be so PISSED that they got cheated out of what they thought was the ultimate end game for the series.
Because ultimately that how I feel – cheated out of what I thought the show was about. While I can appreciate the creator’s artistic vision (the plan all along was to kill off the mother), the title was a misdirect – it wasn’t “How I Met Your Mother”, it was “How I Hard Time Dating, Met Your Mother, She Died, and Got Back Together With Robin.” And as someone who never thought Ted & Robin actually worked as a couple, I thought that was lame. I liked Robin & Barney together.
So, points I guess for taking a storytelling risk (the finale has been almost universally panned by fans/critics from what I can tell). I didn’t care for it, am disappointed by it, but wish that if that’s what they wanted to do, that it had been executed better.
Still, I did love the early years of this show. Lily & Marshall are probably one of the best TV couples ever, and it brought us the glory of NPH. I liked the flashback/flash forward structure which was unique to sitcoms. And I don’t feel like I wasted a bunch of time watching it like I do LOST, so there’s that!