How I Met Your Mother’s legacy has been defined by its disappointing ending, but the show is still worth watching for its touching observations on modern relationships. It’s true that an unsatisfying series finale can make the whole show a waste of time. Dexter fans found that out the hard way when the title character became a lumberjack.
But that’s not always the case. Game of Thrones still has four solid seasons of the greatest television ever produced before it runs out of source material to adapt and takes a nosedive. How I Met Your Mother might have a controversial ending, but it’s still worth going along for the ride with that lovable cast of characters.
How I Met Your Mother’s Series Finale Betrayed Fans After 9 Seasons
The Ending Reversed The Natural Narrative Progression
Whenever a TV show builds its premise around a question, like the mysteries of the island in Lost, it naturally sets up audiences for disappointment when it answers that question years later in the finale. It’s tough to come up with an unexpected, yet still satisfying answer to that question. Game of Thrones put Bran Stark on the Iron Throne.
How I Met Your Mother is streaming on Hulu and Netflix.
After nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother, the show finally had to reveal how Ted Mosby met his kids’ mother, and where she’s been this whole time he’s been telling the story. While the show nailed the casting of the mother and her initial love story with Ted, it bungled connecting that meet-cute to the present-day storyline.
Since the actors playing Ted’s kids were getting older, How I Met Your Mother’s producers shot some of the series finale in season 2. This wrote the ending into a corner and forced the writers to undo seven seasons’ worth of character development to make it fit.
How I Met Your Mother Ending Controversy Now Defines The Show
The Disappointing Ending Is The First Thing That Comes Up In Discussions Of The Show
Today, How I Met Your Mother is defined by its controversial finale. Plenty of other sitcoms have had divisive finales, like Seinfeld, but Seinfeld didn’t spend its entire run building a momentous ending. How I Met Your Mother, as its title would suggest, was building to an endgame from the very beginning.
How I Met Your Mother Is Still Worth Watching Regardless Of The Ending
It’s A Universally Relatable Look At The Foibles Of Modern Relationships
Despite its disappointing ending, How I Met Your Mother is still worth watching. If you take the framing device and the overarching plot out of the equation, it’s essentially just a Friends clone. It’s about a bunch of twentysomething friends navigating their careers and relationships in New York. And frankly, it’s a much better version of Friends than Friends is.
Friends’ dramatic moments mostly fall flat, but How I Met Your Mother will make you cry as much as it makes you laugh.
How I Met Your Mother is a surreal look at mundane everyday life, full of delightfully absurdist humor, but it’s also a deeply profound, universally relatable examination of the foibles of modern relationships. Friends’ dramatic moments mostly fall flat, but How I Met Your Mother will make you cry as much as it makes you laugh.
How I Met Your Mother
9/10
- Release Date
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2005 – 2014-00-00
- Showrunner
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Craig Thomas
- Directors
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Michael J. Shea
- Writers
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Chris Harris, Stephen Lloyd, Joe Kelly, Robia Rashid, Greg Malins, Chris Marcil, Phil Lord, Sam Johnson, Tami Sagher, Gloria Calderon Kellett
