100 Favorite Shows: #34 — How I Met Your Mother
“I believe you’re about to give a big speech on fate.”
After writing for David Letterman’s Late Show, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas found merit in the idea of a hangout comedy set in “the past.” That is to say, their series, How I Met Your Mother, would be set in 2030 with the stories the audience sees being relayed to the children by the main character, Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor, with future narration provided by Bob Saget). The stories centered around Ted and his quest to find “The One,” as well as his youthful memories of hanging out at MacLaren’s in New York with his friends from Wesleyan University, Marshall (Jason Segel) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan), and friends he met at the bar, Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin (Cobie Smulders). The show debuted in 2005 and had a massive, critically-praised, audience-adored run of nine seasons until it left CBS in spectacular fashion on the last day of March in 2014.
(If you don’t want spoilers for How I Met Your Mother and you read this essay anyway, I get to slap you five times.)
Kids, did I ever tell you the story about five friends who spent their entire young adulthood hanging out in a bar together? It’s a story that applies to many different television hangout comedies over the years, but How I Met Your Mother changed a key aspect of the Friends formula: it gave it an overall narrative thrust. HIMYM wasn’t as directionless as the Central Perk gang, who found friends as family in their twenties. Instead, it was always driving to a grander point. HIMYM was a hangout comedy, but it was built around the narrative of the mother. Who was the mother and how did Ted meet her? It gave the show a distinct purpose, even when it wandered down tangents completely removed from the eventual reveal of Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti).
These days, the tangents wouldn’t exist. The mystery of the mother would never take a backseat and the series would instead become deeply serialized. HIMYM was designed for over two hundred episodes with the carousel of women Ted dated along the way (it’s How I Met Stella (Sarah Chalke) or How I Met Zoey (Jennifer Morrison) sometimes). Even though it’d run maybe fifty episodes in 2020, I’m still more inclined to the traditional television model of spending time hanging out with the characters and getting to know them in tandem with their experiences. I think it ultimately made Tracy’s reveal all the more satisfying to see how many times Ted face-planted romantically.
Over time, his grand gestures became more and more helpless. His speed date with Stella was grandiose, but so clearly doomed from the start. In the first season finale, “Come On,” Barney tells him, “These are your awesome years. You’re wasting them on this girl.” It’s an evergreen statement that could be applied to many women and even though advice from Barney is rarely sage, he has a point. Ted could be so obsessed with finding “The One” and a happily ever after that he rarely remembered to live in the moment. Yet, Ted wouldn’t see his dating life as a waste. Not at first anyway. By “The Time Travelers” in season eight, Ted’s resigned to the routine. He falls in love with a woman he frames as his “dream girl,” only to watch it all collapse and push him a little bit closer to quitting romance altogether.
Over time, the rest of the friend group grows tired of Ted’s endless love-based follies. In season seven’s “Ducky Tie,” Ted regales the group with a story about running into Victoria (Ashley Williams) again while they journey from MacLaren’s to Shinjitsu. Throughout, he longs for the idea of what could have been if he hadn’t cheated on her with Robin when Victoria traveled abroad. Goofy from time to time, Ted still leaned more into romantic pining, but the group has heard the “Story of Victoria” with different names substituted into the title time and again. They sit in silence as Ted finishes the story before Marshall gestures to Barney’s ducky tie and pauses, “Alright, well. We’re gonna duck out.” (But more on that later, kids. Consider the ducky tie our goat.)
Ted could be so charming, if not a bit groan-worthy, in his dating that it frequently made the various detours of HIMYM beyond worth it. Still, I always found myself slightly more drawn to the concept of fate. (If Taylor Swift had released “Invisible String” in 2011 rather than 2020, I guarantee HIMYM would’ve played it over a near-miss moment between Ted and Tracy.) When it focused on the fated-to-meet predetermination ascribed to Ted and Tracy (of which we were privy to, but they weren’t), HIMYM was soaring. As great as shows like Friends handled their romances, none were ever as stunning as the gorgeous heights of HIMYM.
Throughout the series’ first eight seasons, it was filled with clues to the mother’s identity and a number of romantic symbols attached to her. (The yellow umbrella is so iconic that I bought one of my own. I have no interest in a blue French horn.) The final clue comes at the end of season eight in “Something New” when we see Tracy for the first time, purchasing a ticket to Farhampton for Barney and Robin’s wedding.
Although, a few episodes earlier in “The Time Travelers,” we received a different kind of clue about the mother: that she was actually dead. It does make sense. After all, why else would older Ted be telling his children the story alone? I remember picturing how the series would end when I was growing up and I imagined Ted saying, “That, kids, is how I met your mother” and then the mother would show up and say something like, “You’re still telling them that old story?” I ended up being half right, but tragically, Ted and Tracy didn’t get to grow old together.
It’s all the more crushing to see how devoted Ted was to her because he knew she transcended his conception of “The One.” In “The Time Travelers,” Ted debates attending Robots v. Wrestlers with Barney while Robin and Marshall argue over whom the Minnesota Tidal Wave drink should be named after. As the episode ends, Barney reveals that Ted is all alone in the bar and the entire episode has been a combination of memory and imagination. According to Barney, the moment is gone. It’s a moment that represents youthfulness and carelessness, but it’s a moment only Ted experiences. The group’s lives are moving on without him and it prompts a fantastical version of Ted to race to Tracy’s apartment with deeply moving piano orchestration playing underneath while he delivers a goosebumps-inducing monologue.
Narrator Ted: “Kids, it’s been almost 20 years since that cold April night in 2013 and I can safely tell you, if I could go back in time and relive that night, there’s no way in hell I’d go to Robots v. Wrestlers. No, I’d go home. I’d go to my old apartment; see all my old furniture, my old stuff. I’d see my old drafting table, where I sketched out my first building. I’d sit on that old couch and smell the Indian food cooking three stories below. I’d go to Lily and Marshall’s place, be back in that old living room where so many things happened. I’d see the baby. I don’t know if you can picture me holding your six-foot-seven cousin, Marvin, over my head, but back then I could. I’d go have a drink with Barney and Robin, watch them fight about their caterer or whatever it was they were fighting about that night. But none of those things is the thing I’d do first. You know the thing I’d do first.”
Ted to Tracy: “Hi. I’m Ted Mosby. And exactly forty-five days from now, you and I are gonna meet and we’re gonna fall in love and we’re gonna get married and we’re gonna have two kids. And we’re gonna love them and each other so much. All that is forty-five days away. But I’m here now, I guess, because I want those extra forty-five days with you. I want each one of them. Look, and if I can’t have them, I’ll take the forty-five seconds before your boyfriend shows up and punches me in the face because I love you. I’m always gonna love you until the end of my days and beyond. You’ll see.”
This was our first indicator that Ted and the mother might not have had such a happy ending. It brings a deep, impossible-to-ignore sense of melancholy to the entire series to know how unabashedly all-in Ted was when it came to romance and how it only inflicted wounds that were far deeper than they’d be if he never dared to love so deeply. The point of the story is to remind us that to feel and to love so much is not hamartia; it’s power. We don’t follow the long roads of fate to regret it once we arrive at the destination.
This much was made clear in “How Your Mother Met Me,” the season nine episode told from Tracy’s perspective as it reruns through an Avengers: Endgame-esque “greatest hits” tour of HIMYM (including a mention of the bar, Puzzles) in the span of just one ambitious episode. (The episode itself was emblematic of HIMYM’s overarching loftiness, which saw them set the entirety of the final season over the course of the wedding weekend.) As the story makes like Angelica Schuyler and rewinds the narrative at stake, we see that Tracy’s road to Ted was just as winding as Ted’s was to her. And with the loss of her first love and the betrayal of one of her closest friends (Andrew Rannells), it might have been an even more wrenching one.
The episode sees Tracy just missing the gang multiple times over the years (it plays like a New York-set anthology series like Modern Love or Easy, where everyone in the city has their own story to tell), but she’s just out of reach because fate waits for a particular moment. A ton of tiny details have to go right for them to meet (Ted asks for wedding band suggestions on the subway. He teaches the wrong course at university), but the show’s ethos is Ted’s ethos and these tiny details are not coincidences. Rather, they are meant to be because Ted and Tracy are meant to be and the show believes in such a thing as a “perfect match.” A clockwise map and an on-time Subway train were obstacles in the way of their eventual coupling so the universe took the proper course correction to be rid of them.
Ted and Tracy really were meant to be, of course. They both have dorky senses of humor and think deeply about the directions of their lives. They’re passionate about life-affirming events and they have a go-along-with-it attitude whenever a friend decides to have a bit of fun. Milioti was such an injection of life into the show’s final season that it almost made you wonder if she could’ve come by in, say, season six — just to spend more time with her.
Milioti was certainly dynamite casting, but that goes for the whole cast. They each embodied the roles with the passion the show’s creators demanded, but the unsung regular cast member was assuredly Bob Saget. Not only was Saget’s voice a perfect match for an older Ted, but it also carried the necessary weight and wisdom required when imparting future knowledge to a younger generation (he nailed Danny Tanner for a reason). Of fans, of his children, of the youthful characters he used to be friends with. This perspective was crucial for understanding how much Ted treasured the glory days of his twenties and how he carried them forward into a future of maturation.
To his kids, Marshall and Lily are Uncle Marshall and Aunt Lily, whose lives had long been altered by their own child, Marvin. They were his family and now they are his real family’s family, too. The group still spends Thanksgiving together, a tradition with an origin detailed in “Slapsgiving” from the perspective of someone too weary to bring the same energy of a slap bet to the present day (2034). It’s a sense of growth and maturity that is imprinted on the episode’s DNA, too (Lily tells Marshall that it’s their first Thanksgiving “as a married couple, as grown-ups”). The wisdom that comes from maturity was a crucial element of Saget’s version of Ted, but there were also plenty of fun stories from being young to pass on, as well.
The MacLaren’s gang had oodles of recurring inside jokes among them (and even with a laugh track, HIMYM set a number of ambitious comedic setpieces in motion, complete with cutaways and flashbacks, to set the series apart from other CBS fare). Their bubbling frustration with outsiders to the group (Patrice (Ellen Dinalo Williams)), a cello player who wants pizza (Mark Gagliardi)). Their “General Knowledge” and “Colonel Stuck-in-My-Teeth” bits. Their own group vocabulary and dialect (graduation goggles, “Just… okay?”). It helped set their friend group apart, not just from the other hangout comedies in television history, but from the other groups they may have encountered in the pub.
The quintet was also keen to obey the arbitrary rules concocted to bring a sense of structure to the group. When Barney acts grossly, Lily sentences him to a timeout in the corner of the bar and he actually obeys. In a slap bet between Marshall and Barney, Lily becomes the slap bet commissioner and they adhere to the standards she sets for the contest. There’s no real reason to do so (Lily has no arbiter’s license), aside from the shared camaraderie and trust that helps make the friend group more fun and game for outrageous activities than many others. (Get you a friend who goes to the Harlem Globetrotters game with you to root for the Washington Generals.) When Ted debates dyeing his hair blond, it also results in the rest of the gang proving they can communicate telepathically.
The slap bet was probably my favorite recurring bit on HIMYM. I appreciated the ongoing thread of searching for group doppelgängers, proclaiming “Gentlemen” and “Blitzes,” and unearthing Robin Sparkles music videos, but the slap bet was such a perfectly constructed recurring idea to revisit. Five slaps (some as surprises and some as mentally manipulative plans that come with prewritten songs) that never got boring as they were doled out. For as much as The Bro Code lost its luster over time (just like Barney’s blogs, as a whole), the slap bet remained cool. By the time 2034 arrived, Barney was hardly the cool playboy he used to be. With age, what can be? But the MacLaren’s gang inspired a number of real world friend groups to adopt traditions as their own; that’s the mark of a standout hangout comedy.
When the HIMYM gang was navigating adulthood, I was still in grade school. I couldn’t empathize with their experiences until later in my life when I began to understand friendships built around group venting, shared apartments, and your friends being the ones who save you during pivotal moments. When Robin and Don (Ben Koldyke) break up in “Doppelgängers,” a tearful Robin arrives at Ted’s apartment and asks him to please say “yes” to her moving back in. I felt the real-life parallel when I and dozens of my friends were suddenly displaced in an unknown city, so we arrived at another friend’s apartment when she tearfully asked us to move in with her. The older I get, the more I realize that the value of a hangout comedy is in unpacking that special time in your life where you navigate the physical and emotional unknown with people who have no better advice to give you than a child. Of course, a child’s wisdom is sometimes the most profound.
When Marshall and Lily initially decided to have Marvin, Barney was the most fervent protester. (Reacting accordingly, he believed that a baby would be a bad idea because it would mess with the group’s dynamic.) He’s not wrong either. A baby changes things forever. It’s just that Barney wasn’t ready for that sort of change and the notion of Marshall and Lily unlocking a new level of intimacy that would be one step further removed from what they shared with the rest of the group. For as many “cool guy,” Fonz-type defenses Barney put up, he still found solace in his friends because his family (including Wayne Brady and John Lithgow) was never quite what he needed them to be (most of his Thanksgivings came with arguments and a sense of abandonment). With humor derived from Internet lingo akin to jokes delivered by Jimmy Fallon, Barney’s endless blow-off persona is a mask for real pain that he channels into a hyperactive sex life.
Every episode of HIMYM seems to introduce a new sex scheme for Barney to toy with (“You’re doing surprisingly well in the Baltics,” Marshall remarks when Barney unfurls a map depicting his progress on a goal to sleep with one woman from every country in the world) to the point where the group is completely numb to his borderline sycophancy. It’s sociopathic behavior that leads to the gang hardly being surprised when Barney hustles Lily and Marshall through the use of five years of Pavlovian and Teppanyaki training, all in a ploy to see Lily topless. (It’s this ploy/bet that results in Barney sporting a ducky tie. See, kids? I told you I’d get back to it.)
In the early days of the show, this would be the comedic focal point of the episode and while, in “Ducky Tie,” it still generates plenty of laughter, it’s also tinged with the maturity friend groups are forced to reconcile with one way or another as they grow older. (For example, Robin keeps Ted’s Victoria story on task, she points out that Barney won’t want to see Lily topless for more than five seconds before it gets awkward, and Ted’s not allowed to look.) Ultimately, it’s hard to imagine Barney actually wanted to see Lily topless. It seems more likely that Barney felt compelled to maintain the shtick of a Manhattan horndog and became increasingly inventive as to how to do so in the wake of his break-up with Robin, the one woman to whom he committed himself.
There is palpable kindness and loyalty within Barney that the audience is exposed to over time, but they’re attributes seen by Lily from the beginning of their friendship. Marshall may bet Lily that Ted and Robin will get back together, but Lily doesn’t bet with anyone when it comes to her confidence in Barney’s own sense of romance, affection, and happiness. What she sees in Barney is different from the rest of the group. She sees the perv he can easily be, but she also sees that he doesn’t want to be that, that he wants more out of life. She knows Barney as the friend who would dress as a street performer to convince Lily to go ahead with the pregnancy (as a fifth doppelgänger) and as the friend who would give Robin a win in an innocuous contest on purpose because he recognizes when his friends need his support, rather than his showboating.
Overall, Lily is the glue of the group. When she leaves Marshall to pursue a San Francisco art fellowship in “Come On,” there is an obvious chemical disruption to the foursome that seems unlikely to survive without Lily and it’s Barney who returns the pieces to the proper place for the group. For as much as Lily saw career potential outside of New York and for as much as Segel used studio comedies like This Is the End to mark Marshall’s oafishness, they’re far and away the show’s best couple. In addition to their box of friend group-based bets, they also have cute tics in their own relationship, including a “pause and unpause” strategy to their arguments that reaches its apex in “Come On” and returns with a tearful reunion in the ninth season.
Lily’s snide, Zorro-type quips match perfectly with Marshall’s secure sensitivity and dad jokes to make them the silly sidekicks of the group. What they lacked in cynicism (thankfully), they made up for with an abundance of exuberance for being alive and in love. What excites Marshall and Lily the most is partaking in “kid stuff.” At first, kid stuff manifests in their proclivity for games and contests (Lily almost runs Ted over in “Subway Wars,”) and their belief in cryptids. Over time, their bucket list becomes a “cradle list” when they find that, in pursuit of a baby, all they need is each other.
Returning to “Subway Wars,” it’s an episode all about the characters finding exactly what they need (Ted finds a fun hangout with Barney, Robin finds proof that she’s a New Yorker) and what started out as a solid joke premise (Lily ditches Robin in a moment of need on the Subway to win the contest) has real consequences (Lily realizes that her obsession with proving herself was what was holding her back). That’s one of the show’s truest examples of maturity — that the characters finally let go of their childish competitiveness and find ways to inspire happiness within the others.
In “Doppelgängers,” Ted remarks about how the search for the fifth lookalike didn’t really matter by the point that they found it (a vendor looks nothing like Barney, but Lily projects her wishes for a child onto him). By then, Lily and Marshall are nearly parents (they stopped looking for a “sign” and acknowledged when they were genuinely ready), Ted is trying to stop pining over fantasies (a rainstorm is no longer sign enough for Ted), and Barney and Robin are hellbent on becoming a pseudo-endgame for one another. As Ted says, they’ve all become their own doppelgängers. Their past antics are just memories and it’s time to be moving on — so the next group can occupy their MacLaren’s booth.
Lily and Marshall were absolutely my favorite couple; I loved Ted and Tracy in the brief time they shared; Barney and Robin were a much more interesting experiment than Rachel and Joey. But Ted and Robin? I mean, I get it. They had their share of iconic moments and an addiction to one another, but HIMYM was ultimately too devoted to them (“Sunrise” probably should’ve put them to bed). At first, it was rewarding in its mysticism, but the devotion became a slavish one that the series might have been better off leaving as a friendship with perpetual sexual tension they would have to decide not to act on.
After their first break-up, Ted and Robin struggle to act naturally around one another. They’re said to be friends because anything else would be an inconvenience, but it’s obviously not something that can be forced. (“Friendship is an involuntary reflex.”) Neither Ted nor Robin are alone in facing the challenges of being candid around a former close friend when they are now a former ex-lover, as well.
It was certainly tougher for Robin, who struggled with showing her sensitive side and always preferred to be the pragmatic one in the friend group while the others indulged their fanciful flights with fervent frequency. Robin hails from Canada (she says, “about,” like “a boat,” but leans more into the hockey side of Canada than the stereotype of politeness) and is strictly averse to tradition, avoiding nostalgia whenever she can.
Over the course of the series, Robin feels as if she is taught not to give attention to the concepts of family and love. She’s unable to have kids (“Symphony of Illumination” reveals this in a manner as unexpected as “The Time Travelers” reveals Ted is all alone in MacLaren’s) and when she does decide to put love (Don) in front of her career (a lead anchor gig in Chicago), it backfires as Don takes the job instead. Robin seeks rescue in Ted after the fact, but you can tell she’s cursing herself for acting like Ted in the first place. Of course, Ted is quick to tell Robin he’s proud of her because “five years ago,” Robin would’ve never prioritized love ahead of work. (He’s done the same with architecture, like Lily with teaching, Marshall with law, and Barney with his obfuscated business work.) She’s momentarily placated, but still conscious of her self-inflicted, “I told you so” regret.
Robin never did take kindly to routine disruptions (“Yes,” “no,” and “I don’t know” are her three replies when Ted makes a grand display of romance when asking her out in “Come On”), so there was still merit in choosing to stay for her friends, but the fact that it was Don who indirectly persuaded her is telling. She was always slightly more detached from the rest of the group because, at the core of it, she was still something of an outsider. To the four of them and to New York. It’s why, as the series nears to the conclusion of friends not seeing each other every day and night anymore (season nine’s “Vesuvius” displays this most clearly as they recognize the importance of their final weekend together, but the theme does begin recurring earlier than the final arc), Robin is the one most in need of a win. Barney is superficially content, Marshall and Lily are happy together, and Ted is on a track of love.
Robin, on the other hand, doesn’t “plan out every second” of her life, like Ted does. He’s sweet, but he can be a bit much with how many different times he professes his love through rainfall. Ultimately, Robin’s concerns when they initially begin dating are founded throughout the series. What if they want different things? What if Robin is too cold? What if they lose the friendship?Their break-up certainly made Robin feel that she’d be removed from the group before Ted would be — and then what? The friends she found in New York wouldn’t be hers anymore.
Robin didn’t know her place in the group or in the future when “Subway Wars” came and they raced to catch a glimpse of Woody Allen (actually Maury Povich) downtown. The future was frequently unpredictable on HIMYM (upon second watch, episodes like “Bad News,” which reveals Marshall’s father’s (Bill Fagerbakke) death, could actually be foreseen as it prescribed the climax with a countdown. Time is always tick tick ticking and we don’t always get a voicemail to placate it), which is why Robin’s method of competing for the status of “truest New Yorker” had to be the winning one. Marshall ran (to the tune of “Marshall Versus the Machines”), Barney rode with Ranjit (Marshall Manesh), and Robin grabbed a cab. Is a cab the most efficient way of traveling New York? Almost definitely not. But as every jolly title card interstitial told us, Robin just needed a win. It brought her closer to the city and to her friends — not that they’d ever dream of abandoning her in the first place.
The truth is, we should all consider ourselves profoundly lucky if we find a makeshift family in a city we don’t know. Sometimes, we might need some help with a rickshaw to prove our good fortune to ourselves, but all it really does is wake us up to how lucky we are — not only to be alive — but to have found something we can call home on a planet where so many suffer. How lucky we are to have entire “plots” of our lives dictated by just sitting around a bar or Shinjitsu telling stories. That’s what it’s all about with a group of friends. Spending all your time together, forging lifelong connections, sharing a beer and a laugh.
As each intro of a HIMYM episode flashed by (with the requisite “bas”), it reminded us of that one night of fun, partying, and drinking the gang shared at MacLaren’s. The blurry Polaroids are all from just one night and after the night ends, it becomes a memory. You get the photos from it if you’re lucky. That’s what’s so moving, to me, about Ted’s speech in “The Time Travelers.” It’s a speech that’s about how he wants every day possible with the love of his life, yes, but it’s also a speech about recognizing the affinity he has for the parts of his life that aren’t there anymore. The smells of Indian food, the ability to go hang out with his friends whenever he felt like it. Those moments slip away, no matter how hard we rail against the possibility. No futuristic shenanigans (Twenty Years from Now Barney) or forced tradition reclamations (Robots v. Wrestlers) or singing (“The Longest Time,” a capella style) can fix the fact that you age out of your youth. Suddenly, you’re wearing sweaters and suitcoats to bars instead of t-shirts and jeans. Adulthood comes for us all and before we even have a chance to be grateful for our youth, we’re hit by a Minnesota Tidal Wave from nights gone by.
The first night Ted hears “La Vie en Rose,” as performed by Tracy, is his favorite night with that version of the song in his life. I was warmed to see Ted just sitting on the porch, head buried in his hands, listening to it and not rushing to find out who the singer was or attempting to record the song for future reference. The moment will only happen once and he decides to bask in it. The cover comes halfway through the final season when each character is staring down their own personal crossroads and everything was repaired soon enough, but in that moment, the group couldn’t rely on each other anymore. It was Tracy who stepped in to provide a salve for Ted, even if not for all of them. An outsider helped soothe the tension in season nine, just as an outsider set the entire series in motion in season one.
It is remarkable to think of how far the characters came by the time “How Your Mother Met Me” aired. Barney clutching an empty bottle of liquor hits all the harder with the two hundred episodes of sexual lechery that preceded it. In a limited, serialized series, would Barney have ever had the chance to grow so much? Would we have bought it? Would I be watching Barney hold a bottle close to his chest with tears in my eyes as I hold a pillow close to my own chest? Hugging it close in 2020 for a note-taking revisit, just as I did in 2014 when I watched characters I aspired to be age out of their own demographic with nothing left to do but actually meet the mother. (The Farhampton train platform scene and Barney holding his daughter scene compete daily for the finale’s most beautiful moment.)
As I rewatched some of the series’ most classic installments (many of which I haven’t seen in over five years), I was reminded of how much of an escape HIMYM was back when I hated going to school. Yes, every Monday meant the return to the classroom, but it also meant a new episode of HIMYM that night. It’s weird to think of the series still airing new episodes, building to its titular reveal, at a time when I was conscious to recognize it, considering how long it’s been off the air now. But for a while, Mondays were for CBS and HIMYM. That’s the television schedule I was raised on and assuaged by. As the piano score entered back into my life this past year for this very project, I felt emotionality heightened beyond containment. Assaulted by chills, I remembered how HIMYM helped make Mondays a little better. And I remembered that, thanks to the series and its many irrepressibly hopeful characters, I really do believe in true love. I really do believe in fate.
