How I left How I Met Your Mother

I used to really enjoy How I Met Your Mother. The way my TV habits go I usually have one sitcom that I watch mixed in with the rest of my shows. It also seems to go that I just sort of let them go rather than riding them out until the end. I skipped the last two and half seasons of Scrubs, I stopped following Big Bang Theory about a halfway through last season and now I think How I Met Your Mother may be cut.

With Scrubs the format changed and it became pointless. There was nothing left to care about. Big Bang Theory stalled more than anything. Leaving that show wasn't a conscious choice so much as actually putting 24 minutes aside each week to catch up just seemed like more work than the show was worth. HIMYM is a different story. Recently I've just been finding the show downright offensive.

I will admit that over the years the show has taken some easy low brow jokes, mostly with gender. I usually consider that sort of broad writing as the sitcom version of suspension of disbelief. Overall it's been funny and smart, at times even clever, with an amazing eye for continuity in their timeline. Periodically the show has suffered from repeating plot lines but I suppose that happens when your show is centered around an event that keeps getting pushed further into the future with each new season ordered. And then Lily got pregnant. I know that Lily and Marshall have always planned to have a kid but I did groan when it first happened.

Adding a child to a sitcom is often a step away from demanding your show be cancelled. But I went with it. I've invested a lot of time in these characters and the writers have proved themselves so far. But they started to mangle that plot pretty early on. In The Slutty Pumpkin Returns we have half the episode devoted to demonstrating how being pregnant makes Lily too stupid to function. They have carefully shown that she and Marshall disagree with where the best place to raise children is, with Lily strongly in favor of urban rearing. Suddenly she is pregnant and a moron, handing out wine to trick or treaters and loving the suburbs. She's hormonal and therefore too stupid to function. Disaster Averted (the episode revolving around hurricane Irene) started to pull apart at their carefully constructed timeline. It also ends with a groan inducing moment putting Robin and Barney back together to an extent, a plot that's been thoroughly explored and completely closed off.

From this point on it seems like the writers wanted to see how far down they could bring the show down with each subsequent scene. The next episode treads water with the Barney/Robin storyline by not providing any sort of closure on a plot that shouldn't be happening. We've seen them together. We know it's terrible and they don't work. As for thinking that perhaps Barney has grown as a person in his efforts to establish a monogamous relationship it should be noted that he has now managed to completely destroy the integrity of his one monogamous relationship. Meanwhile, over with Lily, Marshall and Ted, we see that they are going to a concert. Their plot seems muddled. It starts with Lily insisting that Marshall can't do certain fun things anymore (like "eat a sandwich"\smoke pot) since he's a future parent. It ends with Marshall panicking because he doesn't have time for fun things anymore while stoned and then not wanting to do the things he used to enjoy (like the concert) once sober. When Lily finds out Marshall didn't listen to her about smoking weed she really doesn't seem to care. Her reaction is to demand nachos. At this point I'd prefer nachos to what's going on as well. There's a mixed message that doing fun things takes all your time away but being responsible removes your desire to do fun things, and as a parent one should not try to have fun to begin with, but really in the end no one cares.

The Rebound Girl is really the last straw. The short version is: Barney now claims to have been thinking about becoming a parent when this has never been true until this moment. Ted is now no longer interested in finding love but rather just wants a child. This seems antithetical to the entire point of the show. Lily was told that impulse moving to the suburbs was a symptom of pregnancy brain a few weeks ago but when she repeats the same idea this week it is now taken seriously even though this is contrary to her character up until the last few episodes. And Robin is pregnant. That plot should be really short as she is pregnant with someone she knows she is not compatible with as is also explicitly childfree. If she has changed her mind then what the hell was the point of not having her end up with Ted? Suddenly this show is making me A) feel like I've wasted my time and B) very angry.

The series now seems like an amalgam or rehashed plots, reversed character development and incredibly cheap jokes about gender in general and pregnant women in particular. I will be honest and admit that I'm not dropping the ax just yet. I'm annoyed and beyond disappointed but I've seen some interviews with the writers and show runners that say they have a specific set of developments they are working toward. I'll probably give them one or two weeks to get the show back on track before I take off for good. It's also worth noting that whenever a work needs to be explicitly explained by the writer in a way that is completely outside of the story it is a blaring alarm that the story is being told poorly.