For the last few months, I've been obsessively hoovering up episodes of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix. I was spurred by sorta-kinda-almost spoilers that I absorbed by seeing headlines about the series finale, which aired in May. I had also admired the show from afar, as it were, for a few years - when I lived in London, it was on even more frequently than the Big Bang Theory (which is saying something), and the two shows were generally paired together on the same channels (Channel Four, E4, etc). I'd even started watching it sort of regularly when Season 8 came to the UK, so I caught the broad strokes of what was happening as it led into its last season.
It's kind of an odd show. As Donna Bowman notes in her series of episode recaps for the AV Club, it's a hybrid between the traditional sitcom (like BBT) and the newer single-camera sitcom (like Community, Modern Family, etc) - likely a result of the structure, in which the main character recounts the titular story to his kids, decades later. This allows for a lot of flashbacks, flash-forwards and other time- and camera-related shenanigans.
The structure also means that spoilers are kind of irrelevant. As I said above, the headlines that came out around the time the finale aired have given me a pretty good idea of how Ted's search turns out... and, perhaps oddly, it makes me want to see how they get there. Back in 2012 I touched on the whole spoiler controversy that we're having in the culture right now, and a month or so ago, again on the AV Club, Todd VanDerWerff spoke out against what he calls "spoiler paranoia", by noting in his first sentence that Walter White dies at the end of Breaking Bad.
If that last sentence pisses you off, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry). HIMYM is another show that effectively defies spoilers, by showing you - through its title and framing sequence - that Ted will meet the love of his life and have the two kids sitting on his couch; and throughout its nine seasons, it also states pretty much outright that none of Ted's girlfriends are the mother. The best example is in the pilot, where he describes meeting the perfect girl, has an amazing date with her and tells her he loves her... only to reveal to his kids in the last frame that she's their Aunt Robin.
I'm still impressed by how well that works, especially if my suspicions about the finale are correct. I also love the more minor spoilers that crop up every now and then. In an episode positing that single people automatically have more stamina for nights out than coupled-up people, we have a flash-forward to a wedding where Lily and Marshall leave early, but Ted and Robin decide to stay later. Except this is in Season 2, when they're a couple - so the writers are effectively telling you a month or two in advance that the relationship is doomed.
That's the reason that I call the show a novel for TV. I don't know exactly how far ahead the creators, Craig Thomas and Carter Bays, plotted the show, but however they did it they managed to build a clockwork universe where, so far, pretty much everything that's been teased has paid off. It rewards close watching, for example by having Ted enter the bar wearing a dress in one episode, and not explaining what that was all about until a season or two later.
Like any good novel, the characters are also well-drawn, and generally more than one-note stereotypes. The closest to a one-note character that the show has is Barney, but in early seasons he demonstrates impressive, unhinted-at depths to his character, and then in later seasons he starts to grow out of the sleazy lothario persona we're initially introduced to. My favorite character has to be Marshall, though, because he's at once the most grown-up of the characters, by being the first to marry and have kids, and also the most child-like, with his belief in stuff like ghosts and Bigfoot. I also love his relationship with Lily, as it's pretty rare for a sitcom to show a married couple as enabling besties rather than a bored and frustrated couple (ie, "eh, the old ball-and-chain, am I right?"). That's pretty refreshing.
So I'm at Season 8 now, and coming up to the end of what's available on Netflix. Season 9 doesn't show up on DVD until 23 September, so I'm hoping the episodes will be available for streaming around that time too. All of which is a roundabout way of saying, don't tell me what happens! The show may defy spoilers, but I do want to see how we get to the end.
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