A Statement About How I Met Your Mother

As is becoming my common practice, I have been reading a lot about shows (mostly courtesy of Mr. Ausiello), and then downloading a couple of eps from iTunes to check them out.  I have had some disappointments (hello, Chuck!), but most recently have had great success with a little show called How I Met Your Mother.

At first glance, this show has all of the elements that would make it distinctly uninteresting: set cameras, Friends knock-off setting (five friends live and love and laugh in New York City; they congregate in the bar downstairs from the apartment where three of them live), and a pretty standard premise (boy meets girl, boy pursues girl, etc.)

Imagine my shock, then, when this show turned out to be actually one of the funniest shows I have seen in quite a while.  A great deal of the credit goes to Neil Patrick Harris' Barney, an obnoxious ass who uses words like "legendary" and "awesome" and believes that no week is complete without strippers.  He adds an element of sheer absurdity to HIMYM, and "NPH" as he is called, keeps his character fresh and funny without ever straying into the realm of "too much."

While the basic setup is fairly familiar, HIMYM changes the gameplan enough to make a tired subgenre seem new again.  We flash forward to Ted Mosby ("the dad") telling his kids the seasons-long tale of, indeed, how he met their mother.  And the episodes act as parts of the story he tells them-- comprehensive and well-ordered, but not always in the right order, leaving for plently of surprises and twists.  In this way, HIMYM has learned from the "new" comedies (Arrested Development, 30 Rock) and built stories that we aren't even aware of yet.  An example of this was seen at the end of season 2, when it comes to light that Barney is the reason Lily (Ted's roommate and fiancée of his best friend Marshall) returned to New York at the beginning of the season.  At the time we had no inkling that that occurred, but when it came to light at the end of the season, it made perfect logical sense.

Another bit of refreshment from the HIMYM playbook is the gender-reversal roles.  Robin, the girl Ted falls for in the pilot (before promptly telling his kids, "And that's how I met your Aunt Robin"), doesn't want kids, and isn't even particularly sure she wants to get married in general, while Ted is all about finding the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with.  When they breakup at the end of season 2 (no spoiler alert, kids... we know she's not the mother!), it's because they realize that he wants things that she doesn't.  

In all, How I Met Your Mother is thoroughly charming, often hilarious, and a great source of reassurance that the sitcom is not dead.  If the genre wants to continue in the old tradition and not switch to single-camera inside-joke fests, How I Met Your Mother makes a fabulous transition.

In fact, I think I'll watch an episode right now.