Revisiting 'How I Met Your Mother': It Is, in Fact, that Serious for Me
Thinking about the sitcom like a grad student, hating on Ted and Robin like a madman
In July 2021, I bravely admitted that I was rewatching Glee of my own volition. Even more sincerely, I shared that it was helping me cope with my long-distance relationship. Now, three years later, I have revisited another favorite from my middle school days: How I Met Your Mother. This all began very casually until, suddenly, it became a dire sprint to the end.
Sometime in early summer, my sister asked if I could dog sit for her. Offering her home and, more importantly, her groceries, I spent the night all to myself. Excited to cook myself a nice dish, I quickly realized I needed something on the T.V. so I didn’t freak out and think my isolation would inevitably lead to my murder. But I had to put on something I wouldn’t wholeheartedly listen to. By the time dinner was finished, I had “watched” nearly half of the first season of How I Met Your Mother.
I now need to divulge my past. I was obsessed with How I Met Your Mother. I purchased all of the original songs on iTunes back in fifth grade, which is arguably too young. I had a fan Instagram account called “HIMYM Bucket List” that gained a decent following, and my first boyfriend and I bonded over our love of the show. He even gifted me a necklace of a blue French horn, a fitting symbol because we did not last, and I refuse to cosign Ted and Robin as endgame.
At the risk of being a broken record who won’t shut up about having moved into their first solo apartment, I was quickly uncomfortable with the silence in my new home. So I figured, why not keep up with the HIMYM marathon? Have it on in the background to keep me company and offer a bit of familiarity during this weird and lonely time. It wasn’t long before I remembered why I loved this show so much. It was S1 Ep 11 - “The Limo” that cemented this as a serious rewatch. What can I say? I’m a ceremonial sucker for NYE stories. The daze of spending most of the episode in a car and beautiful TV couple Lily and Marshall made me happy. I fell for what the show came to be adored for– sitcom sentimentality.
One thing about me: I’m a binge-watcher. Once I’m locked in, I’m talking a minimum of 4 episodes a day. Just like that, I was committed, for better or for worse. After a long day of seminars and reading academic papers on campus, I came home craving the show. But this hunger was not because of pure escapism. It soon became an academic project of sorts. My thesis question had arrived a semester early: Did I still love this show? Were all the ways it made me angry then still capable of making me angry now? In short, yes to both.
HIMYM was pretty ballsy, but it possessed a bravery that became so arrogant it inevitably shot itself in the foot. In exploring the promise and limitations of the show, I’ll focus on two aspects that are pivotal to the New York Sitcom: romance and work.
ROMANCE
Do you know how utterly crazy you have to be to write a show explicitly about an effeminate lover boy finding his soulmate and then have him cheat on his partner in the first fucking season? It epitomizes the ridiculous lengths HIMYM will go to make Ted and Robin work. At several turns, the creators will spit on the essence of their narrative necessity—that of Ted Mosby as the hopeless romantic— in service of a couple that was never going to work. I watched a video about the use of cheating in television shows and how it's often handled lazily, specifically referencing Friends, New Girl, and Boy Meets World. The YouTuber Tronn’s specific issue was that cheating storylines are frequently random and inconsistent with the personality of the character doing the cheating. That HIMYM would risk mischaracterizing its leading man as a cheater within its very first season, specifically with the same person he would literally be bound to for the rest of his life, should have told us all we needed to know about the priorities of the show and the unknown mother in question. Tracy was always going to come second.
It baffles me that a show so hellbent on the difficult but beautiful patience required to find your true love would end in such a way. It was never about waiting for the right one; it was about waiting for the wrong one to just give in. In revisiting the show, I didn’t want to be cynical about Ted and Robin’s original romance, and I wasn’t. In fact, I remembered why they were so good in the first place. But ultimately, Robin is clear from the very beginning. She does not strive for marriage, especially not anytime soon, and she does not want children. Her work is her life. More on this later.
Where Everything Goes Wrong
It’s Season 7. Full stop; this is the exact place I can pinpoint where it goes all downhill, and the central romance dooms the show. In season seven, Barney is dating Nora; Robin is dating Kevin. One night, they cheat on their partners with each other. Barney suggests to Robin that they give their relationship another shot, but when Kevin tells Robin he’s in love with her, she chooses him over Barney. Later that night, Ted sees Barney trashing the romantic set-up he left in Robin’s bedroom.
Two episodes later, Robin admits she and Kevin have not had sex (we never see them really be intimate or in bed together, something we see with all other non-interracial relationships, I might add), and four episodes later, Kevin proposes. One thing about HIMYM: they’re gonna throw proposals in the story like they’re an Instagram ad, desperately and at any opportunity. When Robin confesses she cannot have children, the two call it off. Here's where everything goes to shit. For some reason, the writers decided that in response to the heartbreak, Ted should admit that he is in love with Robin. A grave has been dug, and the pit is so deep, it’s not just for Tracy, but for us too.
This decision actively sends Ted 15 steps back in his characterization, and it’s another red flag signaling that we should have seen the ending coming. The writers admitted having planned Ted and Robin from the beginning, and many have agreed this was at the expense of something crucial to television writing: the unexpected direction your characters will take over the next decade. The one good thing that comes from this confession of love is that Ted provokes Robin to give him a rejection for the ages.
“I think you know how you feel about me now and… I don't think time’s going to change that. Just tell me, do you love me?”
“No.”
But the little bastards couldn’t resist. At the end of the episode, Marshall still has faith in the two, for no real reason other than the fact that when we inevitably see Ted outside Robin’s window with that godforsaken French horn, we can’t be totally surprised.
In Season 8, we take an official nosedive into the aforementioned pit. Ted and Victoria are back together! You'll recall that this is the same woman he cheated on Robin with. And what dares to split them apart? Victoria says that if the two want to move forward in their relationship, Ted needs to stop being friends with Robin, a perfectly reasonable request seeing as less than a year ago, he was in love with her for some fuck ass reason, and this relationship dynamic is not normal! Another thing the show knows! And what does Ted do? He breaks up with Victoria.
At its core, this is the tragic story of a man who is shackled to a woman he cannot and should not have been allowed to have. This very same season, we see Barney’s engagement (these things are so flippant) to Quinn fall apart, but also his engagement to Robin comes to bear. And how does the show handle this? Not with a conversation between Barney and Ted, in which Barney ensures his best friend can handle such a dramatic change in the dynamic, but an implied consideration through the playbook. “Tell only Ted about your plan to propose to Patrice. Wait and see if Ted tells Robin, and if he does, it means your best bro in the world has let go of Robin and given you his blessing.” Well, actually, it doesn’t mean that because he is going to spend the entire last season, Season 9, pining over Robin at your wedding, and maybe we should have just sat down and had an actual conversation, you stupid, sick idiots.
That HIMYM devotes its entire last season to cultivating Robin and Barney’s enduring commitment to each other is, again, ballsy. It’s a tongue-in-cheek narrative choice that still speaks to their respective growth: Barney can be in a loyal and loving relationship, and Robin can work AND be loved by someone who wants the same things as her. But, like clockwork, this achievement is something to be undercut and sabotaged by the very same writers who made it happen. Not only does Ted struggle with his feelings for Robin during the entire wedding week, but Barney notices this and gets angry, so they have a thoughtful conversation about it. Cool, closure. Then, Ted shares a moment with Robin in which he quite literally LETS HER GO as she symbolically floats away. Cool, closure. But wait, what’s that coming from behind? Look out! Robin freaks outs about her marriage and says she and Ted should run away together! Uh, ok, fine no worries because Ted officially ends this. He reminds her that she does not actually love him. Cool, closure. Wait, what’s that in the distance barrelling toward us? Barney and Robin’s marriage falls apart in the SECOND TO LAST EPISODE over what? Robin’s work…
WORK
and more importantly, the working woman
HIMYM profoundly resents the working woman with zero clue as to how to write her. Every single time Robin is given the chance to excel in her career, she is narratively punished for it. Her career, from the get-go, is an obstacle. It’s the reason Ted throws three parties before busy journalist Robin is able to attend in season 1. Her willingness to be taken anywhere in the world for her work plays a role in their breaking up. Her going to Tokyo is a JOKE, initially positioned as this big career move, only to become a laughable opportunity that sends her running back and wishing Ted was marrying her. When she finally chooses a man over work, Don, he gets offered the job and leaves. This is why she and Barney are good together, because it allows her the feminist dream of having it all. It is devastating then that she loses Barney specifically because of her work, and that is exactly why I despise how she eventually finds herself wanting Ted in the finale.
All Robin has done is remain consistent and not in some stubborn way. She is passionate, decisive, and has a goal. The writer’s decision for Robin and Barney’s divorce is flimsy at best and downright cruel at worst. That’s what does them in? Her work schedule, of all things? This cruelty is only amplified in the final episode when we see how Robin looks at Ted and Tracy. She’s made her soulless bed, and now she has to lie in it. It’s because of failure, discontent, and loneliness, that she wants Ted, not real love.
In HIMYM, love for everyone except Lily and Marshall is never enough. I can’t shake the feeling that Ted got rewarded. Fine, his wife died, and that sucks, but he got what he wanted and then some. But Robin never really did get what she wanted. Even when her work dreams came true, she was unhappy. Maybe the realists in the audience can appreciate the slightly lackluster truth about aging, but this was never propositioned as a cynical show, and it can’t pull off trying to be one at the tail end, especially when trying to make this grand love story. Both Barney and Robin are shit on but given consolation prizes. In HIMYM, the gag is that Ted is the woman and Robin is the man, yet Robin can never escape the burden of femininity and remains a terrain to be abandoned or conquered by the men around her.
I won’t go too deep into Lily. They couldn’t let her have one single redeeming moment in San Francisco! But, as the show continues, the writers make the correct choice to validate her art and even show Marshall putting her first. While I understand we can’t put a bow on everything, that every woman is different, and their stories shouldn’t be monolithic, I think the show finds it easier to award sympathy to Lily because she is domestic. I love that the show offers a glimpse into her post-partum stress to highlight that her domesticity is imperfect. But, I’d argue that to HIMYM, an artistic career is more abstract and, thus, a more fluid exploration that grants the writers the freedom to easily put Lily’s ambitions on the back burner until they decide they want to do something about it. With Robin, her work is always at the forefront, and the show did not know how to wrap their hands around that fact without choking her character in the process.
It’s just a bummer, and I don’t buy it. I’m grateful this show, in all its laughter and shortcomings, gave me the chance to channel my loneliness into a sort of project. Revisiting something you loved as a kid with a critical lens doesn’t always have to be this hopeless thing; I still had a lot of fun getting worked up over a show from 2005. I’ll never forget having watched that final season on my TV.
I see a lot of myself in Robin. I don’t want children, and I always put my work on a pedestal. But, I moved away to be closer to my partner WHILE ensuring this decision was a smart career move as well. As an ambitious, hopeless romantic, I resent HIMYM for the way it chooses to tell its New York City love story. There’s forever, there’s divorce, and there’s death, and I respect that variety, but Robin deserved her own happy ending, and just because the show had balls doesn’t mean it knew how to produce strong swimmers.
