The First in an Occasional Series of Reflections on a Monday Night Television Show

GOOD NETWORK SITCOMS aren’t easy to come by these days.  Some are quite popular but also pretty flat.  Others find themselves revolving around overly-obnoxious characters a little too much.  Many these days rely on the single-camera/documentary style, which is well and good in small doses.  And while there may be a place for all of them, a special place in my television schedule is set aside for How I Met Your Mother.  True, it has moments of being as guilty of the above criticisms, too, but something about it echoes what is best in any series about a set of friends making their ways through a crazy world.

How I Met Your Mother, now in its seventh season, follows Ted Mosby (architect) on his quest to find the woman who will be the love of his life and the mother of his children.  Along for the ride are college friends (engaged, separated, and finally married) Marshall and Lily, resident ladies’ man Barney, and the one that got away Robin.  For seven seasons now, we’ve seen relational permutations, break-ups, and reunions.  We’ve seen red herrings and yellow umbrellas.  We’ve gotten good  hints that have only led us deeper into the mother of all mysteries.

A couple of articles over the last few months have reminded me of how great a show HIMYM is.  Both speak well of what makes the show stand out from the dwindling crowd of viable sitcoms.

Back at the beginning of this TV season, Spinoff Online columnist Graeme McMillan suggested that the search for “the next LOST was over, and that it ended with the gang at McLaren’s Pub: Ted and friends.  LOST, of course, was known for many things: an over-arching mystery, trips in time that went backwards, forwards, and sideways, and the promise of a decent resolution.  All of these qualities, this “playing with narrative convention,” are present in HIMYM.  I thought it was a brilliant assertion, and am glad to see the connection.  It’s intelligent storytelling with a pay-off.  Actually, like LOST, you get lots of little pay-off moments along the way if you just pay attention.  You can read more of McMillan’s thoughts here.

The second article that makes a great point about the show saw print after the episode last December where Robin discovers she cannot have children.  Linda Holmes’s discussion of “Symphony of Illumination” in the context of the show’s broad narrative sweep was quite thought-provoking.  Infertility is a heady issue, one that Holmes thought the show handled well.  In the episode, the regular narration of “future Ted to his children” is replaced by a narration of “future Robin to her children.”  As the final moments of the episode end, the image of Robin’s imaginary children fades, and we are left feeling something of her loss.  And yet, Holmes asserts, the show can pull it off (even as it did the death of Marshall’s father in season six) because of the overall narrative thrust of the show. The future-narration of Ted reminds us of “everything turning out okay is part of the story; it’s the underlying philosophy of the narrator.  The story is a story of how things work out.”  Holmes goes on: “This is a show that embraces sadness precisely because everything fits together to take the characters somewhere . . . “[It’s] part of [each character’s] story.  It fit into a larger picture of their lives and Ted’s life; that’s the intriguing happy-sad mix that this show has always been able to pull off. . .  [The show] believes in signs, in the power of coincidence and the broader meanings of things that seem unimportant.  It’s not afraid of fairy dust and the idea that if the sad, difficult things hadn’t happened, the good things wouldn’t have happened either, because everything is part of a whole.”  You can read more of Holmes’s thoughts here.

For many of us, life is a long story.  It’s not some television series that ends after six episodes or one season.  And many of us believe that the long story is going somewhere, that it has both direction and destination.  It’s good to have something like a sitcom to remind us of that.  If you get a chance, watch the show.  You may not love it; you may not even appreciate it.  But if you’re lucky, you just might catch the glimmer of a better, deeper story being told.