6274/19204
I've finally done it. Over the last few months, when my wife has been out, I have been secretly watching some horrendous and distasteful “entertainmentâ€. It makes me feel dirty and wrong and I turn it off whenever I hear the key in the door so that she has no clue what I've been up to, but at last it is over. I've finished by odyssey to watch every single episode of “How I Met Your Mother.â€
Spoiler alert - it turns out he never met her, Just sent her an envelope of spunk through the post. The whole final series somehow manages to make the production and postage of the spunk into 24 episodes. It's pretty impressive in some ways.
I did not enjoy the show. But at least I've watched it all. Some people say the final series is a let down, but I disagree. The bar has been set low enough for it to be consistently dire.
I felt hollow and empty when it was finally done, which is apt because every aspect of this show is built on emptiness and phoniness. It has the appearance of a comedy and what seems like clever structure and call backs and affable characters, but if you prick it with a pin the whole thing pops and disappears into nothing and you realise you have been hypnotised into consuming something that has no soul or real emotion at all.
It struck me somewhere around series 4 how the theme tune and title sequence encompasses this nothingness. If you don't think about it it seems like a jaunty enough cool pop song and accompanying shots of young people enjoying a night out. But then you listen to the music and realise it is barely music at all. It's not a parody of music, but an attempt to hoodwink you into thinking someone has composed something and used instruments before you realise it is just sounds, arranged to mimic music, but when picked with a pin it disappears.
I tried to watch all of the Big Bang Theory a few months ago, but it became too boring and weird, but for some reason I persisted with the living Hell of HIMYM. It has dated badly which is astonishing as it only ended 5 or 6 years ago. I can understand that in 2007, when it started, a heartless ladies' man working his way through the stupid women of New York with lies might seem likeable and fun. Though only just. The fact he films them without consent is less of a legal grey area. They tried to make Barney have depth by having him occasionally doing something selfless or seeming to be in love for real, but it was always just lip service. In the final episode he gets a woman pregnant and has a daughter who is dismissive of until he meets her and then is overcome with love. And becomes the kind of dick who needs to have a female child to understand that the women he is using and leaving are also people. A stronger end to the series would have to have him arrested and charged for his crime, or to discover that this psychopath was a serial killer (which he might as well be).
The end is a monumental fuck up for the people who are foolish enough to be fans of this show, demonstrating that the people who created it had no concept of how human emotion or empathy works. I don't want to ruin it for you, and there's no need, because the writers have done that already, but Ted and Robin finally (probably) get together. To do this she has had to divorce Barney and the titular mother has had to die, and both characters are deep into middle-age and so the idea of them getting together actually made me feel deeply sad for all the lost years, the missed opportunities and the loneliness they had endured. Also they never seemed like a good fit or to have any kind of chemistry.
200+ episodes of this was definitely too many. It's not devoid of comedy or interesting ideas, but feels like it could have been written by a robot who was trying and failing to understand the human emotion of love.
But look, the important thing isn't how empty this sitcom is. The important thing is that I have now watched it all. Apart from the bits I missed because I was making toast or looking at stuff on the internet. Around season 5 I have to say it looked like too great a mountain to overcome. But I did it. And no one can take that away from me.
