How I Met Your Mother and the Fallacy of "Great TV" and Serialization

We live in an Age of Serialization where every show must have some overarching narrative doled out little by little. Even in shows that really don’t need this sense of narrative continuity, such as Suburgatory, we see a larger story playing out in the background.

Conventional wisdom has come to see Great TV as shows with complex, serialized narratives that explore complicated themes and weighty ideas. There’s no denying that in this post-Sopranos era we have gotten a number of shows that deserve being insanely overly scrutinized and have been tremendously rewarding due to that. 

However, defining Great TV as just a show where an on-going story exists and that is about certain subject matters (Typically white male anti-hero dramas), and even formatted in particular (perhaps cinematographically interesting) ways, is misleading (For one thing, it is very easy to mislead an audience by giving the look of something serious or prestigious but is very hollow, as is the case with House of Cards or Low Winter Sun, among others. For more, see this article by Emily Nussbaum).

Television was never designed to sustain such long running stories over extended episodes. TV was crafted with disposability largely in mind. There were counter-examples even early on in television history, largely soap operas, or more recently prior to this so-called “Golden Age” of television, such as Wiseguys. But for most of its history that wasn’t the way things were, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

For much of its existence television was looked down upon and scoffed at. It was perceived as low culture and crass and dumb. This was not fair. There was plenty of great works in spite of the medium’s limitations, and tv still has to work around these limitations, something rarely commented upon.

But though this new concept of Great TV has done wonders for the status, interest and conversation on television, it has also hindered how we view television. 

This is something I’ve especially been thinking about with How I Met Your Mother concluding. The finale divided fans by committing to the serialization of the series. It was honestly not really shocking because the show had foreshadowed this concluding moment since about the second season (arguably even season one). It may not have been what you wanted but it made sense in terms of what the story was trying to tell. 

Oddly enough the series I kept thinking of as having similar woes to HIMYM was Lost. So much of Lost supposedly failing to live up to expectations or provide answers (which it did, but that’s a whole different argument) detracted from how people perceived the whole entire series. Because the show was so heavily serialized and it seemed like it was building to something big, when it ended in some strange, interesting and not entirely successful ways many people were annoyed. 

But people took it the wrong way. TV shows have rarely been good at their conclusions. TV is designed for longevity. To crank out episode after episode until it is no longer profitable. What matters far more is the journey and Lost had journey to spare. It was thrilling and fun to go along for the bonkers journey, and also really moving and involving. 

I loved a lot of the journey of HIMYM even if where the destination felt like Hoboken to many of you. And when I think of the series and its legacy I’ll be remembering “Slap Bet” or “The Pineapple Incident”, not how the show lost quality in later years. (Just as with Lost I remember "Walkabout" and "The Constant" and "Greatest Hits")

We care far too much about where we end up rather than how we got there these days with our shows. As Donna Bowman argued frequently in favor of the show: it’s the journey not where we’re going that made HIMYM what it was. 

Point being, we think of television too much in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the week to week. As a whole HIMYM has got a fair amount of misses, but it has plenty of hits to counter its faults. As Film Crit Hulk recently noted, a tv show is never really designed to last 9 seasons, and even the best of the best that last that long are stretching themselves thin. 

HIMYM doggedly stayed true to its vision until the bitter end, and it probably did that in spite of it increasingly becoming a slow, sometimes trudging, march to the finish line. But I forgive the series its trespasses because it doesn’t deserve the flack it has gotten in the wake of the finale. It was a show facing late season blues. As Todd VanDerWerff so perfectly put it: “People seem far more bitter toward #HIMYM than it probably deserves. It's a sitcom than ran a couple years too long! That's all!”

People are far too interested in series being consistently wonderful, special, unique or perfect throughout, but I would argue that there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with burning fast and bright and achieving a handful of great seasons that inevitably lead to some mixed to bad seasons. 

When I think of people who get upset with shows demonstrating wear and tear in later seasons, I think of Ryan Mcgee’s response to concerns over how sustainable Scandal’s freight-train pace is: “How long this is sustainable? Beats me! But also: Who cares? No show knows how good it will be in its future. It can only take care of the here and now.” TV is for the here and now. Fuck the future. Who knows what that’s like. Serialization can only take you so far. If it gets so caught up in the payoff that it fails to make us give a damn about that payoff than a show has inherently failed. That’s why The Sopranos and Lost and Battlestar Galactica and HIMYM finales disappointed us. The journey was so very good and so the payoff could never live up to it. And I’m totally cool with that, and you should be too.