Ranting On...the How I Met Your Mother Finale

I have watched How I Met Your Mother religiously for years and years.  I won't say since the beginning since I very rarely see shows from the beginning, and later today you're going to understand why when we resume our Favorites lists.  However, it was very early (I want to say Season Three), and have never missed an episode since.

So I sat in my room, all snoodled in my bed, ready to watch the finale, and like all fans of a show, I was both A) excited to see how everything turned out and B) sad to say goodbye.  I have spent years with Ted, Marshall, Lily, Robin, and Barney and they have become like reliable friends to me, because that's what truly great television shows, especially sitcoms do-they feel like part of the family.  I also feel in a way that this is the end of an era for me personally.  If I made a list of the network television shows that I watch consistently, the list has dwindled to probably the lowest number of my life.  I still watch the FOX Animation Domination Sunday every week, and Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, and The Big Bang Theory are all still hangers-on in the pantheon, but none of those shows (save Bob's Burgers) are batting their best games at the moment.  Several of them (especially Parks) feels like it's about to expire, and I'll admit that with the exception of The Simpsons none of them can compare with How I Met Your Mother in terms of my personal adoration of the show.  Now I find all of my television connections on cable, and so How I Met Your Mother is the last of what has been almost twenty years of falling in love with live-action network television shows and seeing where they take me as my own life continues onward.  I would list some of those shows, but hey, no spoilers on the favorites series, right?

(If you haven't seen the finale, you should...wait for it...it being the rest of this article) Anyway, enough gushing and back to the point at hand-what did I think of the end of the series?  I have had a night's sleep to ponder about it, and I'm sad to say, like many a finale, my thoughts were "meh."  I don't always hate finales (I've never understood, say, the vitriol spewed at the end of Lost), but this one didn't jive quite right to me.  It wasn't just that there were absolutely no surprises we didn't see coming (the mother dying, the Robin/Barney divorce, the gang falling apart) because we often want our sitcom characters spoon-fed.  It was the fact that it felt so rushed and so incomplete.  The magic of HIMYM has always been that it knows how to show you something out of left field-this is a show that thrives off of going in an unexpected direction: Marshall's dad dying when you think he and Lily will be pregnant, the many moments of Ted/Robin falling apart.  These are all heartbreak moments, and part of me wanted to see that a little bit in this finale.

This may make me sound macabre, but HIMYM has shown some harsh truths in its series, and what separates it from every other network show is that it portrays that sometimes in life, decisions and outcomes are permanent.  We sometimes never get that job we spent the first thirty years of our lives wanting.  That dream guy we meet just before we move for work-he sometimes gets away.  HIMYM was frequently compared to Friends, but Friends rarely (...or ever) showed us an ending we didn't want for these characters-oh, sometimes it took seven seasons to get there, but everyone ended exactly where we wanted them to go.  That's what made things like Ted meeting the love of his life so precious.  After all of that heartache, by chance, by one gutsy chance of opening himself up one last time, he finally found someone to be with and with which to share his life.  That was what the show was leading toward.

And I have no problem with him ending up with Robin, but the way it happened, I just wasn't as onboard.  The laugh track to the kids-did we need that?  The kids simply needed to tell him to go, and he would go.  Simple, elegant-many years missed with the other love of his life, who tragically missed out on many years with her own love (probably her only true love, let's be honest).  That was a fitting ending to the series.  The pacing of the final moments, though, didn't feel quite right.

I'll admit, though, this wasn't my only problem with the finale.  The Barney stuff bugged me.  As the series wore on, the Barney parts of the show always felt the least authentic.  This wasn't because he was so larger than life (sitcoms need that character), but because he always ebbed and flowed in his evolution based on whether the show would get renewed or not.  The divorce seemed appropriate (neither of those characters could quite handle commitment), but I just don't buy that A) it took that long for Barney to knock up some girl and B) that that's how he would have reacted to having a daughter.  This is a guy who spent forty years hating children.  It wasn't like he had been around them that entire time-Lily and Marshall had three, Ted had two, he had a nephew and if I remember right another niece/nephew.  That's a lot of children very close to his life to have changed his worldview.  I just don't buy that he's the kind of guy who has his come-to-Jesus moment when he has a kid.  Not everyone functions in the same way, and that's the great thing about HIMYM.  I'm pretty disappointed that the show spent Barney's final moments making him exactly like Marshall, Lily, and Ted.  Perhaps they wanted a warm fuzzy to give us before we bid adios to Neil Patrick Harris (the clear public favorite on the program), but what better way to do that than to know that Barney would continue to remain Barney?

This is particularly disappointing because they didn't do it with Robin.  Cobie Smulders' snarky Canadian was not my favorite character when I started the show-I didn't quite get the appeal at first.  It was easy to gravitate toward Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan and their emerging relationship, and I just always thought Josh Radnor was sexy (Ted was also a character that it took a while to warm up to), but Smulders was difficult to pin down.  Sitcoms frequently have characters who struggle with the work-life balance, but her Robin is the only character I can ever remember who let her career win (if you count the movies, Samantha Jones comes close, but within the confines of the actual series even she didn't go there).  She was a happy, fulfilled woman who admittedly had some setbacks in her personal life that never turned out, and I was so happy the show let those moments exist in the finale.  It made sense that Robin, the last to join the group, would be the first to leave it behind as she realized she couldn't evolve into the career success that she was meant to be without leaving these people behind.  They wanted different things.  Ted said something very poignant in a recent episode when he stated, "you will be shocked kids when you'll discover how easy it is in life to cut away with people forever."  We all have that friend that we cannot imagine our lives without that two years later is simply an anecdote.  The best friend from high school or college or from your first job who, thanks to geography or a big fight or just time drifts out of our lives and we truly never see again.  In real life a group like "the group" would never last this long.  A sitcom that prided itself on occasional realism was smart to acknowledge that.

The nice thing about sitcoms is, of course, that I have dozens of hours of television before the disappointing finale that I can relive over-and-over again, and even at its most lackluster, HIMYM is a show that is still fun.  The allusions to the show's iconography were all superb.  The title moment was appropriately cute and epic.  And I'll always love the time I've had with these five imaginary people, even if I cannot help but feel a bit of a missed opportunity as this show closed its legendary doors.