Alright, let me get one thing out of the way; I love sitcoms. Some of my favorite television programs of all time are sitcoms. So, naturally, when 2005’s How I Met your Mother started, I was all over it (even though I was only 13 years old). I watched it week-by-week through the entire run of the show. I bought each season as they were released on DVD and I loved it! It was shaping up to be one of my favorite television shows of all time. Then… I stopped watching. When the show ended in 2014, I never watched another minute of the show until I decided to re-watch it for this review. This is coming from someone that’s watched the entirety of The Office probably 20 times. I constantly re-watch shows and movies that I’ve seen a dozen times before.

So, what happened?

I’m not going to tip-toe around the answer; the ending is one of the worst written pieces of entertainment of all time. This might seem like an exaggeration, but let me explain just how lazy this writing is. Now, in writing, the most basic of basic of basic is having a character arc. ANY character: your protagonist, your side-characters, any of them, should start somewhere in their life and end having learnt something. This can be as simple as the bully realizing that he shouldn’t bully as much. Or as crazy as someone finding out that they are some inter-dimensional alien. Either way, a character should be able to grow and change over a story. Or, the characters start to feel flat and not well-rounded. This is incredibly basic.

How I Met your Mother doesn’t fall exactly into this problem, but it does fall victim to poor character arcs. But in an interesting way. The writers for the show wrote the ending before they started. They had to so they could film the children’s’ reactions to Ted’s final grand gesture. They even took into account how characters grow over the run of a show. They knew that things were going to change and characters were going to be different at the end. But, they had already nailed their coffin shut at that point. They were forced into keeping the same ending. I mean they could have just not used the footage of the kids, but they stayed steadfast on their ending. So even though the show grew well past its first season, and we saw Ted and all his friends change over the course of the show, we were stuck with the ending. They had no idea how the characters were going to change. They essentially erased nine years of writing so they could force this shitty ending on us. It is simply lazy. Their characters grew past the ending they wrote, but they kept it anyway. This leaves such a sour taste in the fans mouth. It’s honestly hard to get past the train wreck that is the ending.

I’ve been trying to be spoiler-free so far, but I have to dive in right here. SPOILER WARNING for those that have not seen the end of How I Met your Mother. They repeatedly show us how Ted and Robin simply are not good for one another. Time and time again, I groaned as Ted would try at Robin again and again. They DID NOT WORK TOGETHER. That was told to us throughout the show. They made a major point of this. So, as the show went on, we realize that Robin and Barney are going to get married as the final season. The writers knew that this was going to happen. Which forced them to walk a fine line. You can see them doing this throughout the show. They wanted Robin and Barney to be good enough together to get married. But, they didn’t want them to be TOO good together because they were just going to have them get divorced immediately. All so someone that we have seen NOT be good for Robin, can go running to her once more. Also, they had to have the mother be this amazing character that was perfect in every way. Except that she dies. So we feel bad for Ted I guess? What this does in reality, however, is make us see that Ted and Robin are not good together and Ted finally finds his dream girl, only to lose her again. So, what’s the payoff? Nothing! The show essentially resets everything. Ted is once again chasing someone he should not be with, Marshall and Lily are still together, and Barney is alone. Every single character is reset back to season one. They might have changed and grown, but we don’t get to see it because it is all done in a flash-forward. All of this is because the writers did not realize that their characters grew so much past their original ending, but chose to make it work anyway.

As you can probably tell, I am really passionate about this. I am extremely disappointed by the ending of How I Met your Mother. I was when it aired and I was just as upset this time around. That’s because I really love the first seven seasons of this show. When I started re-watching them recently, I asked myself “why on Earth have I not watched this in six years?” Then I hit season eight and remembered why. The quality holds on barely through season eight, but it’s obvious that the show is going downhill. Season eight is alright though. Then the train wreck that is season nine happens. The entire season builds up to Barney and Robin’s wedding. Then when we finally get there, it skips the actual wedding! It jumps past the thing we have been building up to the entire show and flies to what is essentially an exposition dump. It’s AWFUL. I cannot believe they did this. They rush through ten years of story in like two minutes. Just so we can see Ted ask his stupid kids if he can go running to Robin once more.

Sorry, I started going off again… How I Met your Mother gets a 1.5 out of 4. This hurts me a lot. The show starts as a solid 3 out of 4, and climbs its way to a 3.5 out of 4. Then it stomps any dreams of ending strongly with that dog shit ending. I want to love this show. I even felt a small glimmer of hope again on this re-watch. But the unfortunate truth is; the ending spoils everything. It’s like cooking a nine-course meal, the first seven dishes are a wonderful symphony of perfectly balanced dishes. Then the eighth dish is finding out you have testicular cancer in your left nut. But it’s okay, because the ninth meal is finding out that you also have cancer in your right nut.