How I Met Your Mother - Season 1

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

For a show that’s clearly trying to be the next Friends, CBS’s How I Met Your Mother has a surprisingly clever concept. The show is narrated in the year 2030 by a father (the always-awesome Bob Saget) telling his two children the story of, well, how he met their mother decades ago (i.e., present day). The bulk of the show stars the younger version of himself, Ted (Josh Radnor) and his friends and girlfriends. It’s very high concept – and maybe even a bit too confining, especially with the clunky mess that is its title – but it ends up being an unusually decent sitcom.

Aside from consistently lovesick Ted, there’s his best friend Marshall (Jason Segel, late of the quickly-cancelled cult favorites Undeclared and Freaks and Geeks), Marshall’s fiancée Lily (American Pie’s Alyson Hannigan), and Ted’s (he thinks) soul mate, Robin (Cobie Smulders). As a source of endless catchphrases and comic relief, there’s Barney, played by Neil Patrick Harris.

Harris is the show’s immediate standout, as his well-dressed womanizing misogynist is clearly the most charismatic person on the show. After “Suit up!” turned into something of a popular catchphrase, though, the writers tried to milk it, and subsequently had Barney and the rest of the gang begging viewers to fall in love with their new vocabulary: “Lemon Law.” “Legendary!” “Self-Clink.” “Bro-by-Extension.” After a point, the Friends meets Seinfeld style started to seem a little too desperate. They might as well have just turned to the camera and said “Please please please repeat everything we say so our show becomes culturally relevant.”

Still, it’s surprisingly well-crafted for a sitcom. The plots can get a little hokey sometimes, and they have a tendency to all end on a note of supreme puppy-dog-lovesick-sappiness, but when it’s sharp, as in episode 10, “The Pineapple Incident”, it’s really sharp. And it also has going for it one of the best precedent-trashing twists out there: we find out at the end of the pilot that Ted doesn’t end up with Robin, his central love interest. It’s like knowing from the start that Ross and Rachel will be doomed. (Cobie Smulders’ portrayal of Robin always seems vaguely cold and unlovable to me anyway, so I hope they don’t wimp out on us and end the show with them getting together anyway.)

Later in the season, it becomes apparent that Marshall and Lily have the more interesting love story anyway, which might be a tad problematic for the show. They need to give Ted a personality beyond the requisite “Wah…I want to marry somebody.” Radnor is an appealing actor, so give him something to do. Marshall and Lily, by comparison, have personalities that make their relationship charming and interesting even though it has lasted seven years. (There is a bit of a twist concerning that, however, that serves as part of Season ...