How I Met Your Mother: What went wrong with it?
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pdlussier1 — 9 years ago(January 22, 2017 01:17 PM)
It was already clearly established that Cindy was a lesbian long before she was "brought back" (Season 6 Ep. 01). Can't say I agree with you one bit that having her being a lesbian is bad writing in any way. Also, she wasn't really brought back; rather, the portion we see her in later is the same time period as when she's initially introduced, but told from the "mother's" point of view.
Personally, I just don't see how or why anyone would think that she's the one Ted should end up with. Given their incredibly brief history together, which was anything but great, I just don't see the logic.
Is it that you like the actress that played Cindy, Rachel Bilson, and you wish she played a bigger role in the series (though not as the Cindy character per se)?
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RomanceNovelist — 9 years ago(January 22, 2017 01:42 PM)
That's just a personal preference on my part. Ted meets her at the school, they can't date because she's a grad student or whatever. I thought the actors had great chemistry together. The difference is that we see them interact.
I think the difference is that, the character who plays Ted's wife is thrown in as an afterthought in the last season. By the time she is introduced, I no longer care who he ends up with. It was too late to make me like her. We don't see Ted build a relationship with her, interact with her, then we learn she DIES and he goes right back to the woman who rejected him and broke his heart, and married his best friend. There's no pay off.
I dont' care about Ted's relationship with his wife because I never really saw them together, building a relationship. The audience has time to like the wife, and time to like Ted, but not enough time to like them together. She's great but she's separate from Ted. BACK TO MY ORIGINAL POINT: The writers treated Ted's character horribly and there was no payoff to finding out how ted met his wife/the kids' mother because we never get to see how they met, as we did with Ted's other relationships.
The wife spent more time with Lily than she did Ted, on screen. What was the point of that? Terrible writing.
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pdlussier1 — 9 years ago(January 22, 2017 01:59 PM)
I agree that the devs that take place from season 7 through the end can be jarring, and even deeply unsatisfying for many, and that caring for the "mother" isn't made easy for the audience (maybe even impossible).
I see where you're coming from re "the writers treated Ted's character horribly", but, and although there's truth in what you're saying, I'm not sure to what extent I agree with you if one considers that he's also the narrator and all that this implies
But there's no right or wrong here as we're dealing purely with personal preferences at this point, methinks.
Ignorance is bliss 'til it posts on the Internet, then, it's annoying. -
adam-176 — 9 years ago(December 30, 2016 06:15 AM)
Depending on perspective, it was either keeping to the Ted / Robin ending decided in the first season, or developing the Barney / Robin relationship in such a way that it would have to be undone.
They could have kept the Ted / Robin ending without it feeling jarring if they hadn't spent so long building Barney and Robin as a couple. Similarly, they could have continued developing Barney and Robin if they'd ditched the Ted and Robin ending.
Unfortunately, they tied themselves to the ending by filming the scenes with the kids, so they ended up with two seasons of Barney and Robin build up that they knew they would have to undo somehow.
Good luck, Captain. I think you're about to go where everyone has gone before
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loonieloona — 9 years ago(January 08, 2017 06:49 AM)
Since they knew going in to the final season that Ted and Robin were the real endgame, I think the final season was not handled well.
In a show that's all about flashforwards and flashbacks, setting the season over the wedding weekend should not have prevented half of the stories from being in the past and the future with the wedding weekend as a framing device rather than the primary storyline.
We could have gone into Barney and Robin's wedding knowing already that the marriage wouldn't last (think of the musical The Last Five Years) which could have given and opportunity for the significance of certain details to make more narrative sense.
We could have actually seen more of Ted and Tracy's life together so that we didn't feel quite so much like we knew too much but not enough about Tracy.
We could have seen Robin reintegrate into the family so that the kids' enjoyment of her makes more sense.
Basically they needed more episodes like How Your Mother Met Me that touched on the wedding weekend but wasn't really about it.
They could have used the time better rather than all the filler plotlines about bacon and the captain. -
janhommer — 9 years ago(January 10, 2017 01:05 PM)
And do you agree that the title How I Met Your Mother was really a mistake? It made you think that the most important thing about the show was meeting the mother, when it was actually Ted's supposed growth as a character.
It was obvious from the beginning the whole mother thing was a MacGuffin. I think the ending is self-explanatory, Ted's daughter says it : The mother doesn't even appear in the story (or hardly). I personally didn't even expect to see as much of her as we got to, I thought we'd see her in the last scene of the last episode with Ted going "and that's how I met your mother", the end. Instead, it turns out -and that's a great irony- that the punchline of the first episode wasn't a punchline after all. See it really
is
about Robin and how could it not be, that's been obvious for the entire series. Very fitting ending, actually, in my opinion -
bigdog-65546 — 9 years ago(January 28, 2017 04:29 AM)
I don't think the writers anticipated how Barney's character would develop the way it did, or how amazing Neil Patrick Harris would be in that character. He easily became the fan's favorite and while they realized that they had to give his character more play, they also knew they had to keep true to Ted, who was the main character in the story.
And I think HIMYM was an appropriate title. While the series wasn't always about how Ted met Tracey, it was different and grabbed attention.