As most of you have undoubtedly already discovered, Netflix's selection of movies and TV shows is kinda like heroin. You start out and everything is awesome and you're just like “Holy shit Mad Men and Doctor Who and Sherlock and all this other shiny stuff” but then you turn into a hopeless junkie who takes advantage of every free half hour to squeeze in some more Supernatural. Best case scenario, you manage to control the habit before it takes over your life, but it's much more likely that you'll: A) overdose and need someone to inject pure adrenaline into your heart, or B) you'll end up fighting a bunch of strangers in an alley because you think the rotting corpse of a stray cat is actually your dead daughter.
Actually, that last one is pretty unlikely unless you're absolutely godawful at writing comic books. But I digress.
In any case, one of the side effects of my Acute Netfliculitis was that I started watching How I Met Your Mother a few months back, and I pretty much loved it. The cast had good chemistry, the humor was surprisingly risque, and it had a fun tendency to mess around with over-used sitcom tropes. (Also, I'm more or less behaviorally conditioned to like anything with Neil Patrick Harris in it.)
In short, everything seemed great.
Somewhere along the line, though, things started to change. I noticed a flaw in the early episodes, but I was willing to overlook it because the rest of the show was so fun. I hoped it would get better, but it really, really didn't. In fact, I just finished the fourth season, and my mild annoyance has swelled into irrational antipathy.
I hate Ted Mosby.
He's obnoxious and pretentious and passive-aggressive and is always a bitch when the situation doesn't even remotely call for it.
I hate him and I want him to die.
Of course, I know this is impossible: Ted is the show's narrator, and the whole point of the show is that it's a story he's telling his children (a story that involves WAY too much sex with random women to be appropriate for sharing with one's own offspring). Barring the possibility that Ted pulls a Swayze at some point in the show's future and is actually contacting his children from beyond the grave (I guess Bob Saget would be a medium?), I'm sure he's going to survive until the show ends.
Le sigh.
The inherent problem with HIMYM is that the event which brings about Future!Ted's happy life is also the event which will end the show. It's How I Met Your Mother, not How I Met and Courted Your Mother and We Had Some Rough Patches but Everything Turned Out Okay in the End. There is a theoretical end-point for this show, but it's going to get dragged out for as long as humanly possible because it's a popular sitcom and popular sitcoms always hang around for a few seasons too long. The show has to keep going, so Ted also has to keep being an obnoxiously, consciously naïve wet blanket who's waiting around for The One to show up on a silver platter.
In short, the show is suffering from what I like to call the Incredible Hulk Dilemma.
You see, all Bruce Banner wants to do is settle down, live a normal life, have the government stop chasing him, and never turn into a giant green smashing machine again. That's all well and good, and maybe it'll actually happen some day – but the day Bruce Banner achieves lasting peace is the day that his story ends. No one cares about some scrawny irradiated scientist; they read those comics because they want to see HULK SMASH. If the unstoppable, rage-fueled monster gets to be happy, the story ceases to have any point.
The same phenomenon is at work in HIMYM, but it achieves the opposite effect: the plot point that's keeping the story going is actually the one I care about the least. That being said, I would probably care about Ted's love life more if he occasionally turned green, tripled in size, and went on a rampage through downtown Manhattan.
Oh well. The show has already surprised me several times, so I'm holding out for a major plot twist at the end: those kids we keep seeing aren't actually Ted's children; he's just gone crazy and kidnapped them and is telling them this big long story to try and make the Stockholm Syndrome set in faster.
Here's hoping.
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