TV COMMENTARY

By Emily LePain
For Murphy News Service

After nine seasons, 208 episodes, countless legendary!’s, too many doppelgangers, and the endless loop of the “I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)” cassingle stuck in Marshall’s tape player, the “How I Met Your Mother” TV series came to an end this spring.

What kept the show around for so long?

“How I Met Your Mother” drew heavily on 18 to 49-year-old adults, a demographic that CBS liked. But with actors such as Jason Segel and Neil Patrick Harris in high demand, (the two who comedically carried the show), the series simply couldn’t run forever.

For the few who have never seen the show, a quick synopsis is in order:

“How I Met Your Mother” is about Ted Mosby (played by Josh Radnor) telling his kids the story of how he met their mother, Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti).

The show debuted in 2005. Marshall (Jason Segel) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan) had been together for almost a decade and were starting to make plans to get married.

Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) was a hilarious, well-dressed womanizer who told Ted he would “teach [him] how to live.”

Robin (Cobie Smulders) was the newcomer to the gang, having just moved to New York from Canada, trying to get her big break as a television news reporter.

Over the next nine years, the show would follow Ted, Marshall, Lily, Barney and Robin through the ups and downs of their lives, but the main premise of the show was always ‘How [Ted] Met [Their] Mother’.

The finale, “Last Forever,” was bittersweet. Not only did we say goodbye to a show that was near and dear to many of our hearts, we said goodbye to five characters with whom we’ve laughed, cried and matured.

The finale also was the show’s highest viewed episode, with 13.13 million viewers, surpassing the Season 1 episode “The Pineapple Incident,” which had 12.3 million viewers.      The lowest viewed was the Season 6 episode “Landmarks,” with 6.4 million viewers. Over the course of the show, average viewership never dropped below 8 million.

“How I Met Your Mother” received positive reviews and gained a cult following throughout its run.

It was nominated for 72 awards, winning 18. The series was nominated for 28 Emmy Awards, including a nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series, and won nine.

Stars Alyson Hannigan (Lily Aldrin) and Neil Patrick Harris (Barney Stinson) won a People’s Choice Award, and Harris received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.

In 2012, seven years after the show’s premiere, “How I Met Your Mother” won the People’s Choice Award for Favorite Network TV Comedy.

Even in the later, less acclaimed seasons, “How I Met Your Mother” remained as hilarious and sentimental as it was relatable. It was more than just a sitcom; the combination of hilarity, coupled with emotional depth, real world concerns, and life, were what made the show great.

Show creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas skipped around the central narrative of “How I Met Your Mother” to show who the central characters were and who they would become as the series progressed.

That’s what “How I Met Your Mother” was all about. It portrayed the messiness of life and adulthood in a realistic way. Things don’t always work out our way and people change. It makes sense that as the series progressed, the show would develop and change as well.

Right? Maybe not.

In the pilot episode of the series, Ted sees a beautiful girl across the bar. The logical assumption is that it’s the mother, right? After all, this is the story about ‘How [Ted] Met [Their] Mother’ after all.

Wrong.

The episode ends with Future Ted saying, “And that, kids, is how I met your Aunt Robin.”

Throughout the course of the series, it became clear that Robin had intense chemistry with Ted and Barney. And it became clear that Thomas and Bays regretted not having Robin be “the Mother” as they pushed them together countless times.

There was no way to have predicted the dynamic between Radnor and Smulders or how much fans would want to see them together, and it became clear that Bays and Thomas began looking for ways around the storyline they had introduced in the pilot.

But eventually, we as viewers were left banging our heads against the wall watching Ted and Robin try and fail time and again.

Finally, in Season 7, Ted explicitly tells Robin that he can’t keep waiting for her anymore, because as long as there’s even the smallest chance he’ll never really move on. He asked if she loved him, and Robin said no. “I think you know how you feel about me now, and I don’t think time’s going to change that,” he said.

Then during “The End of the Aisle,” the second to last episode in the final season, Ted tells Robin that he didn’t love her the same way he once did. So when the finale ended with Ted getting back with Robin, it was, frankly, exasperating and annoying.

The prospect of Ted and Robin ending up together made some sense because they had so much history. But it was frustrating that Bays and Thomas undid the progress Ted had made with moving on from Robin over the last few seasons, even in the last few episodes, all in an attempt to achieve the final Robin/Ted pairing.

“It seemed like a cop-out,” Neil Justin, the TV and radio critic for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, said.

It wasn’t a stretch that Barney and Robin’s marriage could fail, either, as they were very alike in personality. But at the same time, the divorce felt forced, especially after spending the entire ninth season focusing on Barney and Robin’s wedding and evolving relationship only to have it all undone in the last episode.

Many devotees of the show became more invested in Barney and Robin’s relationship than they were in Ted and Robin’s. It seemed as though the only reason Barney and Robin’s marriage was toxic enough to fail was because the creators wanted to get rid of the couple to clear the way for the Ted/Robin pairing.

But after the divorce, Barney completely regressed to the old, womanizing self that he was before he fell in love with Robin, erasing every bit of character development that Barney had gone through over the last five seasons.

Earlier in the series, Barney’s antics would have been amusing, but a 40-year-old Barney with a pick-up playbook was just depressing.

But then Barney meets his daughter, Ellie, and, at that point ,the fact that Barney was happy was all that really mattered.

Cue to “The Mother,” Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti). Ted’s soul mate, Tracy, was a latecomer in the series, as we didn’t see her until the very end of the eighth season.

Bays and Thomas had set their course early on in the series in an attempt to escape from the trap they had set for themselves back in the pilot, so they filmed the kids’ reaction at the end of Ted’s story then, eight years ago. They saved them for the end of the series, sticking to the original plan by introducing Tracy at the very end of the show and then had her die so Ted and Robin ended up together.

But they didn’t account for the palpable chemistry between Ted and “the Mother.” We only saw bits and pieces of Milioti’s character over the ninth season, but we got to know and grew attached to Tracy and loved the idea of Ted’s “happily ever after” with her. But it was obvious for a while that she was going to die, and Ted’s teary flash-forward with her at the Farhampton Inn during “Vesuvius” only solidified the theory.

So when Ted mentioned she was sick, it wasn’t a surprise. Tracy’s death eventual death was depressing, but it reflected the unpredictability of life and the pain that comes along with it.

But the way the writers handled her death made it feel cheap. She was barely in the story. Ted’s kids said it was always a story about how he was “totally in love with Aunt Robin.”

And just like that, Bays and Thomas gave the impression “The Mother” was a mere blip in Ted and Robin’s epic love story, which wasn’t the case.

Tracy, not Robin, was the love of Ted’s life.

Mikala Durham, a freshman at the University of Minnesota, said, “I liked that Robin and Ted ended up together. It was just in the wrong time frame. We didn’t have time to connect or grieve for the mother or get used to the idea of Robin and Ted getting back together.”

Jonah Solheim, a freshman at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, said, “They didn’t do [“the Mother”] justice at all. They basically threw her out at the end in favor of Robin, which didn’t make sense because the mother of your children and the love of your life should definitely take precedence over a girl you met in a bar.”

Solheim, who writes about entertainment for his school’s news site, The Current, said. “The whole show is literally about a family and how they came to be, and the writers abandoned that premise.”

Star Tribune TV critic Justin said, “We didn’t see much of the mother this season, which was a disappointment given she was such a pivotal character in the course of the show. Her death felt rushed and they should have given us more time to get to know here and then really mourn her.”

As with Justin, many viewers’, this one included, simply didn’t like the way the show ended. The story just wasn’t given enough time to play out naturally. They could have introduced “The Mother” sooner.

Instead of spending the entire last season focused on Barney’s and Robin’s wedding (only for it to fail 15 minutes into the finale), the writers could have spent that time introducing “The Mother” and let viewers grow to love her. They could have actually spent time on her death and allowed us to mourn her, and then slowly reintroduce the idea of Ted and Robin.

Despite that, the finale had its moments.

• We watched as Ted saw “The Mother” on that train platform, and as he plucked up the courage to talk to her for the first time. It was a scene that couldn’t have been done in a more beautiful or satisfying way.
• We watched Ted and Tracy fall in love, have their first child and get married.
• We watched Barney become a father and Robin a worldwide news anchor.
• We watched Marshall finally get his dream job and become “Judge Fudge.”
• We watched as Marshall and Lily had their third child.

Kris Rhude, a junior at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said, “This is not a love story between Ted and “The Mother.” In fact, it’s not really a love story about Ted and Robin. I think it’s a story about life.

“Ted and “The Mother” had a beautiful life together, but then tragedy got in the way. But disasters do happen. And people move on. It’s a show about Ted’s emotional journey,” Rhude added.

Even in light of everything that should have done differently in the finale, “How I Met Your Mother” will forever remain a favorite.

Moments such as Lily and Marshall’s breakup, Barney’s angry reunion with his father and the death of Marshall’s father are reminders of the emotional depth these characters displayed over the last nine years and why it was easy to fall in love with the show in the first place.

No, the finale’s several disappointments won’t be what we’ll remember.

Instead we’ll recall the Canada jokes, Barney’s blog, Marshall singing “GOING TO PHILLAY!” loudly in his car, and the night Ted and Barney licked the Liberty Bell.

We’ll remember the high fives, the intervention banner, and Barney’s undying love for laser tag.

We’ll remember the red cowboy boots, the time Ted went blond, the (still unsolved) pineapple incident, and “Haaaaaave you met Ted?” I’ll remember the Bro Code, Robin Sparkles, and the slap bet.

We’ll remember the heartbreaks, the laughs and the losses.

We’ll remember the yellow umbrella.

And I, for one, will remember Ted, standing underneath Robin’s window again 25 years later, holding up the blue french horn that started it all.

Emily LePain is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.