When ‘How I Met Your Mother’ began, it was a very clever
show. It quickly shook off the immediate ‘Friends’ comparisons because it had
an overlying mystery of love looming over it that made people want to keep
tuning in every week for clues as to this elusive Mother is. It was fun and it
was something that had never been seen before in the sitcom world.
Also, in its early days, it struggled for viewership. When
it went on hiatus during season four for the writers’ strike, the writers
speculated about what their contingency plan would be if they were cancelled,
(they jokingly said the mother would have been the coat check girl) which was a
strong possibility at the time.
But then they started getting viewers, lots of them. With
the help of reruns airing on cable and Netflix they actually gained viewers in
its later years (which is extremely rare for any type of television show).
Seeing that the show was really profitable now, CBS decided to keep extending
it. This through off the writers’ original plan that the show would end with
Ted meeting the Mother and there would be no more.
The popularity caused a major problem for this plan. With
CBS renewing them one year at a time, they would have no way of knowing when
the finale would be or how to lead up to it. With literally a hundred more
episodes to fill than they would have expected, all of the sudden they needed
to figure out a way to make new stories without diverging from their original
plan, thus creating many, many filler episodes and plotlines that were really
forced (I’m looking at you Zoe).
If they could do it over again, I think and hope they would
have done it differently. They reached the point of no return about not
introducing The Mother earlier in the series run and really handcuffed their
ability to tell fresh stories.
****FINALE SPOILERS AHEAD. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FINALE
AND DON’T WANT IT SPOILED, STOP READING NOW****
So why was the finale so abysmal in my opinion? They
completely undercut the original story and cheated us, and Ted Mosby’s
children, of the romantic story this show was originally built around. If you
don’t remember, Ted Mosby used to be Mr. Romantic. This was supposed to be the
story of a nice guy, who had great friends, just trying to find the love of his
life. That’s the story that we were presented with, and that’s the story I
wanted to see.
I didn’t want to see Barney have a dog as his wingman. Or
Robin be unnecessarily mean to a coworker who liked her. I wanted to see Ted
get the woman of dreams after many hardships and have his friends help get him
to that place. Obviously any time a show gets stretched out for as long as
‘HIMYM’ did, the characters have to change, otherwise it will become stale. But
after season 4 they really began to sell out on many gags and started going
back to well far too often for some of the running jokes.
