I saw an
interesting question posted by someone on Twitter. I came across it because
someone I follow responded and I got to thinking about it. My acquaintance
refused to answer because she didn’t want a mob of “Um, actually…”
I can’t say I blame her.
So anyway,
on to the question.
“What TV
show declined in quality as it went along?”
That question
in and of itself is loaded as fuck. Mostly because questions of quality almost
always are. Quality is subjective and varies from person to person.
But what it comes
down to is this: every single show declines in quality over time, for a
variety of reasons. It could be any number of reasons. Writers leave or get fired;
actors change their outlook on the character. And of course, there's studio
pressure.
That last item
brings one show to mind: How I Met Your Mother.
I swear it was good at first.
Now I know it’s
not exactly controversial to shit on HIMYM, and that’s not quite what I’m here
to do. I’m going to share my opinions on how and why the show’s quality
declined and how it could have been better.
How I Met
Your Mother’s premise is right there in the title. We hear the main character,
Ted, voiced by Bob Saget, because why the fuck not, telling his kids how he met
their mother. They filmed the framing scenes before the rest of the show so
that the kids would be a consistent age. This alone tells me that the creators
knew how they wanted the story to unfold.
With that in
mind, I’m willing to bet that they had three or four seasons planned. Five at
the most. The other seasons? Well, they weren’t planning on that. Most sitcoms
don’t last nine seasons. Only a select few have hit at the right time, with the
right circumstances to stand the test of time.
I can only think
of 2 other sitcoms off the top of my head that had runs as long or longer than
HIMYM. Those are Friends and The Big Bang Theory.
Now, I have
my problems with Big Bang, but that’s neither here nor there. I was too young
to have any serious critique of Friends back in the day. It hasn’t aged well, of
course, but it’s a product of its time. And like we don’t judge old literature
by today’s standards, (at least we try not to) shouldn’t we do the same for
older tv shows?
But I
digress. I’m here to talk about HIMYM.
As I was
saying, it seems to me that the creators only had a few seasons planned for the
show. But then it hit the big time, on the back of Neil Patrick Harris’s
character Barney. The reason I say it’s because of him is because, as the show
went along, it focused less on Ted and more on Barney.
That’s not a
bad thing in and of itself, the character did show growth over the course of
the series. At least until the final episode.
Which brings
me to what might be the most contentious point of the entire series: the Finale.
Unlike
everybody else, I didn’t mind the finale. It wrapped things up and was true to
life. Divorce happens. Death happens. Just because it’s a sitcom doesn’t mean
we shouldn’t show those things. Why should a sitcom be immune to bad things?
The problem
wasn’t with the finale. It was with the entire final season leading up to the last
episode. The whole gods-damned season was one big gimmick. The whole season
took place in the span of one day, which isn’t a bad gimmick in and of itself.
It worked for 24, right? But it was stupid for this show, since they
hadn’t used this any other season.
Also,
because of the length of the last season, there was a lot of filler. A lot of
bullshit could have been avoided by cutting the number of episodes down and
removing the filler. Or spreading the events of the finale out across several
episodes. This would have let fans process the emotions over weeks, rather than
over the span of a single episode.
For
instance, we learn that the titular mother died years before the frame story,
i.e. after the kids were born. Which we should have seen coming, since the
title of the show kind of hinted at that: How I Met Your Mother. These kinds of
stories are usually told by both parents. Unless one of them is out of the
picture, either thanks to divorce or death. Ted is telling the story alone, and
Mom never pops in at all. Not even to ask why the fuck the kids have been in
your study for weeks, you long winded fuck. So, it stands to reason that Mom is
either gone or dead.
Sure, the
ending boils the series down to “How I Wanna Bang Your Aunt Robin”, but if they’d
spread the events of the finale out, it wouldn’t have been as bad. They could have
shown Barney and Robin’s marriage falling apart, rather than smash cut from “I
do” to divorce. They could have shown Mom interacting with the others in the
group more. Make us like her for who she is, rather than saying “yep, this is the
Mom we’ve waited 9 seasons to see. Guess what, she’s dead.”
How I Met
Your Mother should have been 5 seasons shorter and the last season should have
dropped the stupid gimmick. Ultimately, though, it is a case study in how a show
can go to shit from studio meddling.
