Character Arc Analysis: How I Met Your Mother
Now that the tackiest thing a sitcom could do is have a laugh-track, it’s pretty impressive seeing the amount of respect from both critics and fans How I Met Your Mother still receives. Sure, people hated the series finale, but disappointment in a show’s finale often speaks to how invested they got in the show in the first place. Ultimately, the finale’s biggest problem was that it was written years in advance and so much happened between when they wrote and filmed that moment and when they aired it.
Show-runners Carter Bays and Craig Thomas didn’t exactly have a master plan plotted out like, say, Matt Weiner did for Mad Men, so the sloppiness was undeniable. Network shows churn out 20+ episodes a year. They don’t have the luxury to do what Mad Men did, and since it’s a sitcom, writers become dependent on caricaturing the cast for the sake of efficiency. It’s just way easier writing episode 17 in season 6 when the characters are assigned their given tropes and can be plugged into a situation so everyone knows how they’ll react.
To Bays and Thomas’ credit, getting to the point where a show is able to have its own stable of established and well-trodden tropes is an achievement few shows reach. That’s always the double-edged sword of a long-running sitcom. Characters always deviate wildly from where they started from the first episode because reality has to be amplified for the sake of comedy. Sometimes it’s enjoyably cartoonish. Other times is a betrayal to what people initially liked about a character. How I Met Your Mother is a good show to look at from this perspective because, compared to other shows of its era, it has this cartoonish nature to it without going as far as its contemporaries. So let’s just start this and see what happens.
Ted Mosby (Played by Josh Radnor)
In the show’s early days, Ted Mosby embodied the quintessential nice guy who was a hopeless romantic and constantly wondered why he was still single. I know these type of people, and they’re the worst to be friends with on Facebook or follow on Twitter because they WILL remind you of how nice they are and how single they are every day.
Slowly but surely, though, they added enough self-effacing aspects to Ted. Plenty of jokes were made at the expense of his pretentiousness, and some light barbs at the expense of his why-can’t-girls-love-me mentality, especially towards the latter end of their run.
What humanized him the most was how each of his relationships unfolded. He was downright mean to a lot of the women he dated. Ted cheated on the first serious girlfriend (Victoria) he had on the show. But for whatever reason, the writers focused more on how crazy Ted was for Robin, and they more or less sold it as a blip on the radar.
Ted wasn’t exactly the best to Zoe, either. He basically broke her marriage up and betrayed the one thing she was passionate about so that he can help a corrupt bank build their shitty skyscraper. Admittedly, he did get left at the altar by Stella, and his apartment was set on fire by Jeanette, a stereotypical ‘crazy girl’ How I Met Your Mother made portrayed frequently throughout its run, so he certainly faced his share of highs and lows.
The protagonist on a fluffy as hell sitcom about friends trying to make it in New York isn’t going to be harshly scrutinized for any asshole behavior. Fans are ultimately supposed to root for him without thinking too hard about it. The writers paid enough lip service to humbling Ted for it to somewhat work, but overall, he remains insufferable.
Lily Aldrin (Played by Alyson Hannigan)
Because there was only a 5 episode stretch where it seemed like Lily and Marshall might not be together forever, they acted as the sole constant surrounded by friends who went from hookup to hookup at breakneck speeds. Thank goodness for them. There were way too many disposable love interests for the sake of an episode’s premise that it by default turned every character into a wild fucking horndog. Most of these ensemble sitcoms don’t have a strong couple in the group right out the gate, so it was a good move. Especially considering how time was spent on Ted and his nauseating search for an eternal soulmate or whatever.
And as a standalone character, Lily had the most substance to her compared to everyone else. How was it that she was the only person who had actual existential dread about what she was going to do with her life? That’s ridiculous! Marshall always knew he was going to be an environmental lawyer since he was a kid (which totally happens all the time), Ted was never not going to do something architecture related, and Robin moved all the way to Japan to be a news anchor.
Each one had their work-related low points, but Lily was the only character who ever got to the very relatable “wait, fuck, I think I’ve made all the wrong choices,” point. She was a teacher at first, and it was fine, but she really wanted to be an artist. So she moved to San Francisco to go for it, awesome! But, oh fuck, she sucks at it! That’s basically 99.999% of the open mic community in any given metropolitan area. For a moment, Lily was even unsure about whether or not she should be with Marshall, which was understandable, considering they’d only dated one other person since freshman year of college.
In spite of her fluctuating career success, she was still the one everyone turned to for the most reliable advice. Barney, the most emotionally repressed character on the show, would only open up to her. Ted even seemed to confide in her more than Marshall at times. This sort of power on everyone around her made her a little mad with power at times, going as far as paving the path for a myriad of Ted’s breakups. Some of that stuff was downright sociopathic, but again, you can’t really punish anyone too hard in a sitcom.
Marshall Eriksen (Played by Jason Segal)
While Lily had no idea what she wanted to do with her life throughout the show’s run, Marshall always did. He just wasn’t able to do it the entire time. Watching him grapple with the idea of selling out and working for Goliath National Bank made for his most intriguing storyline. Making the choice to work for GNB actually weighed on him. Ted didn’t even blink at the idea of creating GNB’s building. And Barney was the most at home there because he’s living scum. It showed that he at least had a semblance of a conscience.
And although this is a pretty low bar to clear, seeing him not be some bummy absentee father who got jokes out of not knowing what was going on with the raising of his son felt refreshing. After a solid 59 decades of “wait, what’s your name again?” type jokes, I’m taking it as a win that Marshal actually enjoyed being a father to his children, a rarity on sitcoms.
By showing who he was before getting married and having kids, that wouldn’t have been a believable or enjoyable transition to watch. Marshall Eriksen turning into a bum would have been insane. That isn’t to say he was an awesome husband throughout. A lot of the fights he had with Lily were always based on some archaic hangup he had about what he expected from his partner. He was always shown to be insanely wrong and actually learned why he was wrong, so the writers toed this line well. Again, maybe I’m celebrating him too much for basic decency. But the bar is so low for TV husbands and dads that it must be noted.
Robin Scherbatsky (Played by Cobie Smulders)
To get back to the finale for a moment: whether they had Robin stay with Barney or not is beside the point. They did such a good job proving just how incompatible Robin and Ted were throughout the show’s run than having them end up together felt like a real betrayal. Thanks to that betrayal, the show’s entire premise turned out to be a ploy by Old Ted, fixated on telling his kids how much he loved their Aunt Robin. They were a terrible match! Would all of their initial complications really be made easier by throwing 2 kids, 5 dogs, and Ted’s dead wife’s ghost into the mix?
It took a long time for Robin’s character to become something more than just the object of Ted’s affection. But once the writers did decide to make her fleshed out, she became way more enjoyable than Ted, which admittedly, is a low bar to clear. It worked, though. Injecting incredible amounts of silliness into her backstory pushed made her more likable. And in retrospect, Robin Sparkles was probably the best thing the show ever did. Not only was the idea of making the show’s most serious character a forgotten-about Canadian pop star just really funny in its own right, it finally humanized her in a way that hadn’t been done before.
Aside from Don, the writers never gave her a love interest of note outside of the friend group. An odd choice, considering it was noticeable very early on that she and Ted were a terrible match and Barney Stinson is the well-tailored antichrist.
The worst thing about her relationship with the latter is they weakened Robin’s character just to make it happen. For whatever reason, the writers spent such a painstaking amount of time and energy creating a scenario where Barney could possibly be a suitable partner for Robin that they made her a sad and gullible mess who apparently didn’t mind getting lied to for the better part of an entire season? Instead of doing all that, they could have maybe, I don’t know, written a love interest compatible with her for the first time in 10 years?
Barney Stinson (Played by Neil Patrick Harris)
This motherfucker. What a monstrously shitty character. Just an endless well of rape jokes, lazy puns, and supposedly ironic catchphrases that wound up being genuine attempts at forging a catchphrase somewhere along the line.
People loved this character, though! Neil Patrick Harris was nominated for multiple Emmys, losing out each time to Jeremy Piven for his work on Entourage. Not only that, the market for douchebag comedy was so in demand during this time, they released an actual Bro Code book inspired by a super stale running bit on the show. We need to set the mid-2000s on fire and never look back.
From the get-go, it was pretty obvious Barney was going to be Screech in a suit with way more sexism. Later on, they tried showing he was Screech with a heart of gold and it was sorta annoying that I was expected to care about his father issues. The writers were about 50433 date rape jokes too late for me to get invested in the man behind the suit.
I’ve been doing my best to steer away from the actual comedic substance of the show because of its subjective nature. But it’s hard to avoid when discussing Barney because nearly everything he says is meant to be a punchline. It’s undeniable, however, that the mainstream appeal of Barney is what kept the show from being canceled. But rewatching him now is a god-damn yikesfest. I’d have given up a few seasons of Ted Mosby’s moping about fate in a bar if it meant I’d get 400 fewer jokes about an adult man trying to have sex with a teenager.
What’s unfortunate is that Harris has a real knack for classical comedic acting. His faces were always expressive, he could pull off a great pratfall and.. his close-up magic is kinda good? These scarce moments, along with the times he would say a joke and literally nobody would go with him, were when he was most funny.
Despite being off the air for just a few years, it’s striking to see how poorly How I Met Your Mother has aged in such a short time. It is.. a rough re-watch to say the least. But despite all the really bad jokes, I still found myself invested in what was going on for the most part. That’s a win overall. And it has to be attributed to how well each character grew over time. How I Met Your Mother might wind up being not only the last highly regarded laugh-track sitcom but also the last NYC-based show that’s just about friends hanging out. Truly the end of a dumb and terrible era here.