The first two episodes were written by the show creators, so its not about a change in writers.
Really? Crazy. I’m not just imagining the show’s downward spiral, am I? Did it always suck and I never noticed?
My guess is that the show has probably gone about as far as it can with its premise, which isn’t surprising, really. Even successful shows only last about six or seven years before that happens, and this is season 8 of How I Met Your Mother. Sometimes they manage to get lucky and redefine it, like happened to Cheers, but usually not. Even Friends only lasted ten seasons and Seinfeld nine and those weren’t as good in the end either.
Well they already had everybody except the married couple bang each other in every conceivable combination. Maybe… and I realize I’m reaching here… they could have the protagonist meet your mother and see where that takes the show?
After eight years of buildup that can only end in disappointment, though. ;-)
Disagree.
This show was absolutely knocking it out of the park for almost three seasons…and then the writer’s strike happened halfway through season 3. For whatever reason, that break seemed to change the writing of specific episodes of the show itself.
Like most long-running shows with an over-arching theme, HIMYM has both “regular” sitcom episodes, as well as story episodes that kind of affect the Mother narrative that ties the show together. For whatever reason after the writer’s strike, the creators of the show began, slowly at first but then more and more often, to write really lazy, gimmicky “sitcom” episodes. The “story” episodes remained a strong point, and that’s continued.
At any rate, season 4 was almost a non-stop disaster. The episode with the blizzard and the gang trying to run their own bar? Silliness. The episode with the fighting bartender? Awful. The episode with Barney’s fake family? The hell was that all about? The episode with Marshall inventing a boardgame or whatever? Horrid. All were “sitcom” episodes, and just awful to watch.
Season 5–other than a few episodes like “Bagpipes”–was even worse.
Thankfully, Season 6 righted the ship a bit, and Season 7 at least nailed down the story episodes.
Season 8? So far, so bad…but I will point out that this show has, since season 4 at least, struggled out of the gate with bad episodes. That said, it sure does feel like they’re killing time waiting to get to the point where they can introduce the mother and wrap the series and all move on.
I was fine with it until season 6. It really started to struggle after that.
I never saw it until season six, and then my wife andI watched all of the seasons over a summer. Man, 2-4 were really close to perfect.
You just yada-yada’d over the best part.
Anyone still watching this?
Just curious if they will actually reveal the mom in the seasons finale or just show the back of her head or something…
I hope the mother turns out to be another dad and the kids were all adopted.
PREPARE FOR ENDGAME
So the end of that last episode was weird. That whole “I am here early just so I could spend those extra few days with you” is making me think they are going to go out on a ballsy dark note - like future Ted explaining the story of “how he met their mother” at her funeral or just after her death.
If they do that…I’ll be pissed, but I had sort of the same reaction.
It’ll totally fail the premise of the start of the show, where the kids are all unsentimentally having to hear the story though, so hopefully.
BTW, continuity: The coat-check girl is in episode 5 of season 1 (“Okay Awesome”), and Ted says he’ll see her soon (which he notes, he didn’t) and on the cab ride home from the club he jokes “Who knows, maybe it’ll be her?” before cutting in with Saget’s narration: “It wasn’t.”) Same actress. I guess she’s on Glee now.
Oh, and yeah, we’re at endgame. Next season is the last season of the show.
Good, now that it has an ending maybe the writing will pick up.
The deal with next season being the last is due to the trouble signing Jason Segal and NPH to new contracts. Given that it’s still one of CBS’s highest rated shows, they might find a way to extend out another season or two.
Hoping not. Or, if they do, hoping they make the “reveal” of the mother finally and move on to the “and this is how our first year of dating went” or something like that. Yes, you couldn’t use break-ups as a threat for the show, but there is plenty of comedy gold in the first year of dating.
It made me think the mother probably isn’t still alive when he’s telling the story to his kids, not that she died the day he met her or anything.
Eh… while I think it would be a pretty ballsy approach, the seven seasons of upbeat, “Kids, in the [season] of [year]” that starts off every episode doesn’t really sound like the words of a guy who’s explaining to his children how he met the one true love of his life which he lost recently, 17 years later. That sorta sounds more like something you’d expect from a sociopath. Or Barney.
The show obviously ends with the children stabbing their father for making them sit through 8-9 years of nonsensical stories that had nothing to do with how he met his mother.
So… he’s telling his kids an endless, go-nowhere story that begins eight years before he meets their mother? And she’s recently dead, but he’s not actually bothering to spend most of that time telling them anything about her, or what she was like as a younger woman? He’s just going on and on and on and on and on about the women he banged BEFORE he met their dead mother, and about how he and his alcoholic friends used to really tie one on before she was in the picture?
There’s no way that’s how this show ends.