How I Met Your Mother...Eventually

I'd like to take a minute to reflect on a television show and what it says about our culture in the way that it reflects it back to us and helps us form a better understanding of why it is that we do what we do when faced with the circumstances that occur in our daily life.

That show, of course, is Hee-Haw.

Actually, the show is How I Met Your Mother, and while it's not consistantly good (the recent storyline involving Barney and a stripper pushes all the wrong buttons for me, it seems like a mistake), it does do something that I think a lot of shows don't even bother to do: tell a story.

Now, as an English major (hell, as someone with a degree in English; I often have to remind myself of that when I'm feeling low. I have a degree, I'll just be damned if I can do anything with it just yet), I am what you might term a fan of narrative, the convention by which a story is an actual story and not just a random series of events strung together for high ratings or to please the insane demands of Charlie Sheen. And a few TV shows seem to fit nicely into the niche of "over-arcing story," though sometimes they become so bogged down in the mythology that they lose focus of the characters in order to advance what the audience knows (or thinks they know) is important. See the last few years of The X-Files (though I did not).

HIMYM from the very beginning satisifies both the demands of a linear story (after all, he's telling it to his kids, though I agree with Peter Griffin that it doesn't make any sense for him to sound like Bob Saget when he gets older) and the occasional foray into side-stories that complement the main narrative while not distracting us from it entirely (unless they do so in a manner that makes us appreciate the main narrative all the more). It's not so much a show about how Ted, the protagonist ("main character," as non-English majors might say), meets the mother as how it is that he didn't meet her sooner. There's an almost Waiting for Godot effect that, if I'd ever read it, would strike me as either an apt metaphor or not (after all, does Godot ever show up? Dunno).

Now, some people have problems with this, suggesting that the delay of meeting the mother (and thus starting the story of how the kids that are listening to the story came to be) is being drawn out. They're right, of course, but the producers of the show know something: this is how the best romantic comedies work.

Think about a typcial romantic comedy: boy and girl meet, then ninety to a hundred minutes later they end up happy together. End credits, wait for the obvious Rod Stewart standards cover, and consider gouging your ears out everytime you think you hear the romantic theme playing in your local Starbucks. But hold on: what occurred during the eighty-plus minutes between meet-cute and making whoopy? Shenanigans, that's what. The journey is often more rewarding than the destination (unless the destination is Katherine Heigl, then it's just torture all around).

What I like about the show is that it acknowledges this, with false leads and false starts because often times, that's what it's like in real life. We know that Ted met the mother, we know he's happy now (unless he isn't...ooh, interesting idea: what if he's telling the story of how he met the mother while he's getting a divorce? Nah, too sad). What matters is what came before, what led to that. Therein lies the drama, however well-done it is (or isn't).

I'm roughly the same age as Ted (the "protagonist," if you'll recall), and I've had my share of near-relationship experiences with various women over the years (a few of them were even aware of this and active participants in the near-relationship, happily enough), so I can relate to him better than I can, say, Don Draper (though I don't have AMC and thus cannot judge for myself whether I'd like Mad Men). HIMYM isn't my favorite show (that nod, right now, is to Community though I still watch The Office out of loyalty and obligation) but it is a show that I like tremendously, because it takes the somewhat stale notion of the meet-cute and extends it past the breaking point, to where you almost don't care how it turns out because you're enjoying the ride.

That was a slightly pretentious sentence, but what do you expect? I have an English degree, people!

Anyway, enough time spent musing in front of the computer screen about a fictional story, now off to the bookstore to buy another fictional story!