How I Met Your Mother

How I Had Sex With a Whole Lot of Women Before I Met Your Mother.

HIMYM is one of the greatest sitcoms. It remains consistently good over its entire run, with great running gags that span seasons. The final season does change up the format and the show suffers a little as a result, but there are plenty of great moments within. I actually enjoyed the ending, and it makes sense, contextualised by the rest of the show. The characters are relatable and the cast do a great job.

There's a certain genius in remaking FRIENDS with an improbable amount of guest stars from the shows that people who hated FRIENDS were watching when FRIENDS was on and setting numerous painstakingly-arranged character-altering moments to bands people who hated FRIENDS were listening to while doing lines off a Possum Dixon CD, having waited till they got old enough to sink into the sentimentality like a scuzzy bathtub after a bender. Plus the structural conceits are sometimes actually genius.

The sit-com format is sort of quaint and faily restraining, but within this genre, HIMYM (in essence a modernized Friends) represents a high water mark, often using the framing narrative quite ingeniously. In the end though it outstays its welcome a bit, and the final twist ending represents one of the worst miscalculations I've ever seen on TV.

Imagine if Dane Cook thought he was John Hughes.

I think this show is brilliant from start to end. Not everybody will enjoy the ending, or even the last season for that matter, which I admit could have been handled better in some ways, but I still really like the way the story and characters are handled here, and it's got some of the most hilarious moments and characters I will always remember.

Gets worse every season but the first few were very heartfelt, or it could have been mostly my personal connection as a young single person in my 20s at the time. It's very hard for me to rewatch knowing how the series ends. Fav scenes: the arc involving Ashley Williams' baker love interest; Robin Sparkles.

Everything but the atrocious ending is great.

I had long thought that Friends was the last good traditional sit-com. HIMYM is a solid successor, once you get past the horrible laugh track. It was really inventive with its use of story-telling, playing around with memory, unreliable narration, etc. Thank Christ I knew the shit ending going in because I cannot imagine how terrible that must have been for all watching in real time (though I think I would have figured it out a few episodes before the end).

Rating purely based on the remembrance of a decade with the show. -- For the first four years, "How I Met Your Mother" was justifiably discussed as "the next 'Friends'", however, things debatably took a different turn from season 5 onward with filler episodes starting to spread. For the last two seasons it seemed that the creators had lost their vision since they turned the once beloved show more and more into a persiflage of itself. Finally, the show's conclusion was a big slap in fans' faces.