If I arrive late to a TV show party, then I try to catch up as fast as possible. I inhaled 'The Wire' in a month and 'How I Met Your Mother' in about 3 months. I confess that it's all a blur at this point, but like a television amnesiac, certain sights and sounds will jog my memory.
The 'Pilot' is memorable because it followed the standard romantic comedy formula of how characters fall in love (in this case, Ted having a love at first sight moment over Robin) and just saying, "Nope. That's not how it works on this show." I think "Haaaave you met Ted" was great, but if they started the "Legendary" and "Wait for it" here (I forget) then I was tired of those jokes from the start. Both HIMYM go-tos took a while for me to come around on, as "Legendary" is just a douchey thing to say and "Wait for it" along with "I know, right?" are both phrases I 1) thought had dropped out of the zeitgeist years ago ('The West Wing' did "Wait for it"!) and 2) view as hacky. But just as 'The Office' resurrected an ironic version of "That's what she said," HIMYM took stupid hacky phrases and made them its own. Good for them.
'Purple Giraffe' demonstrated one of the strengths of this show: modernizing sitcom tropes. We buy that Ted will contrive to be with Robin because he's a hopeless, sort of pathetic and certainly over-the-top romantic, thereby hiding the sitcom plot's inherent contrivances (multiple parties; multiple coincidences). It just works. Of course, it helps that it has such great characters. I started to think about this during the pilot, but this episode really made me believe that Carter Bays & Craig Thomas really just took their personal lives and television'd it up a bit. Ted & Marshall likely mirrors their friendship, Barney's a guy they knew, Lily is either a composite of their wives/girlfriends/SOs or one woman in particular and Robin represents the woman who intrigued them, probably dated, but ultimately realized they could never work out as a couple. The show is structured and drawn in such a way that I'm convinced the only way it could be done was by shorthand: their lives. Write what you know, after all.
And with that, I turn it back over to Hobbes to keep rolling with his reviews. I'll jump back in after the next two. Maybe we'll write about another show. Or a topic that does not involve moving pictures.
