How I Met Your Mother might be the most frustrating sitcom of all time for me. I’ve watched through the whole thing beginning to end probably three times in the seven years that it’s been off the air, the most recent of which was just this last month during a particular low-point of this quarantine. And the first maybe three season of the show are, I think, genuinely great. The cast is super talented, all the characters work well, the format and the editing and the pacing were all fresh and fun and new. It was like Friends for a whole new generation. And then of course it stayed on way too long, the jokes got stale, the writing got lazy, and we eventually got one of the most historically terrible final seasons this side of GoT. They started out feeling so different from everything else on at the time and so quickly became an embodiment of every stupid sitcom trope we all hate. But none of this is very unusual. What is is that despite it’s terrible overall ratio of three good seasons to six bad ones, I keep coming back to it for some reason, but I guess I just watched it in middle school a lot and it makes me nostalgic. Also I’m a sucker for Jason Segel. Anyway, I’m sure you could find a million dumb online blog post of people chronicling the rise and fall of HIMYM, what was wrong with the ending, exactly at what point it stopped being good and why, and I’m sure that none of you care in the slightest. So instead I’m going to talk about the fact that the entire show is filthy, filthy capitalist propaganda.
In a broad sense you could probably say that about most western media. But on my recent third (ok fifth) watch-through of How I Met Your Mother, I really started to pick up on a theme in some of the long-term character arcs that made me real uneasy. Like many other sitcoms staring four to six single young friends in New York City, the show’s humour largely revolved around the dating world, and like Friends or Seinfeld before it, the careers of our central characters were always, to some degree, simply window-dressing. It never really mattered that Monica was a chef or that Elaine worked in publishing. Likewise, it never seems particularly important to the overall show that Marshall, Jason Segel’s character in HIMYM, had spent his whole adult life studying to become an environmental lawyer so he could fulfill his dream of saving the planet. But keep in mind this is a show set in the future, entirely structured around flashing back to the present. Whether the writers realize it or not, they’re not just showing us 2005 to 2013, they’re showing us 2005 to 2013 from the perspective of 2030. And sure, we’re only really using that device to showcase our main character’s journey towards a wife and kids, but it makes it hard to believe that the writers would just throw that whole environmental lawyer thing in there without having some kind of point to make, right?
And it would seem at first that their message is a positive one. One of our main characters is fighting for the environment, and it’s seen as a real attribute. If you tuned into a random episode and they happened to bring that up, you might think ‘oh, cool, how progressive of the writers, they clearly also care about the environment and are on the right side of history’. But if you watch through all nine seasons and actually follow the arc of Marshal’s career, the message is pretty different. For the first couple seasons, he’s in law school, and when he finally graduates he ends up in corporate law to make ends meet. The character really hates it, feels slimy and evil, like he’s betraying his dreams, and eventually quits to pursue a job at an environmental law firm. Only he doesn’t get it, and ends up unemployed for a chunk of the third season. Then in season four we’re introduced to Goliath National Bank, or GNB, which becomes more and more important to the overall show, and to my overall point, going forward. They’re the company that Neil Patrick Harris’s character works for, and the entire joke throughout the whole series is that they’re the most comically evil, faceless corporation of all time. And by the end of their introductory episode Marshal ends up working there as a corporate lawyer again, and it’s treated like a really positive thing. Like, “sure, I’m working for the bad guys, but at least it got me off the couch!” and that’s that.
Eventually he does become an environmental lawyer, very briefly, but again the ultimate lesson there is kind of a gross one. First his boss, the head of the firm, tells him everyone who works there has completely given up because it’s been definitively proven that it’s too late to save the planet. Marshal does manage to inspire hope again, but it only leads to a season or so of episodes about how much of a losing battle they’re fighting. Every time he takes on a case we see him lose and the environment take another hit, and finally in the last season he quits and becomes a judge. I should point out that they do throw in some bullshit about “judges are the ones who really make the decisions, so if I really want to help the planet, this is the way” but like, judges don’t really get to choose their cases, do they? Could you really be a judge of only cases that involve environmental law? I mean I’m an idiot and I don’t know anything, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. I’m pretty sure if your goal was to save the planet, working specifically as an environmental lawyer, for an environmental law firm, specifically building cases against companies who are polluting the Earth, would earn you more progress than becoming a New York State judge and just waiting for a case about the environment to come across your desk so that you can, not cast a verdict, mind you, cause that’s the jury’s job, but just pass sentence, IF the big evil company is found guilty. So we’re really just left with the notion that he became a judge because it was a better move for his family. He’s got bills to pay, and a second kid coming, and having a stable career is more important.
To be fair, I’m not saying that that’s a totally unreasonable or evil decision for a real person to make. The show is ultimately about the characters finding happiness, not saving the environment, so if that’s what really makes the most sense for the character, fine. I’m not saying you have to completely re-write your ending just to have a good message. But again I ask you to think about the context, and what the show is trying to subtlety teach you with this arc: “In twenty-five years, when you look back on this time period, you will realize that fighting to save our dying planet was a completely pointless endeavour, and what you should really do if you want to be happy is give up on trying to enact any kind of social change whatsoever, find as cushy a job as you possibly can so that you can keep contributing to the economy, pump out 2.5 children so that there won’t be a gap in the work force when you die, and for the love of god don’t for any reason ever stop buying things.”
But maybe now I’m starting to sound a little biased. After all, one example does not a pattern make. And by now the word ‘environment’ has probably lost all meaning, so let’s examine another character; Neil Patrick Harris’s Barney. Barney is the absolute most insultingly over-the-top embodiment of the “one guy in the group who is a horrible, horrible womanizer, but it’s fine and we just treat the whole thing like a big funny joke” character that somehow became a loveable staple of 2000’s television, and the decision to make him the emotional grounding of the last three seasons was easily one of the most bafflingly misinformed in the history of the genre. But we all already know that, so lets’ talk about the most minor and irrelevant part of his character, his job. He works for the aforementioned Goliath National Bank (technically not until they bought out his company in the fourth season, but his job never changed and we hadn’t gotten a company name before then). And the whole running gag is that he’s super rich and successful but no one actually knows what he does. He just sits around in a building downtown and always wears suits, and that’s the whole joke. “Ha ha, look how easy it is to do well in corporate America if you’re just a slimeball with no values and no work ethic.” And then when the big evil bank is introduced, he becomes their number one spokesperson, again to an over the top and comical degree. And it’s at this point where you really start to scratch your head at what message these writers are trying to send. I mean the Marshal thing you could maybe justify, but here we have one of our main characters, who we are supposed to like, becoming a complete soulless shill for the most evil company in the world, and nobody treats it as a problem, and it just becomes normal moving forward. Get it? What a funny recurring character joke, right?
Then, our main character Ted ends up working for the evil bank too. Seriously, that’s not a joke. He’s an architect and they bring him in to design their new headquarters. And again, he worries about the morality for like an episode and then dives right in because it’s a good career move. There’s even a whole season arc where they have to demolish an old hotel to build his building, and he falls in love with a women protesting to save the historic structure. And the conclusion is that she was just a rich spoiled housewife who only cared about the hotel for personal sentimental reasons and spent so much time fighting for causes just because she was avoiding her marital problems, and Ted was right to side with the comically evil bank and bulldoze the historical landmark. I shit you not, that’s the lesson. Getting ahead in business is the only thing that matters and anyone who fights for any cause is just doing it for attention. Are you laughing yet?
So that’s it. They introduce a comically, over-the-top, super-duper evil faceless bank, and then spend the next five seasons slowly walking three of our five main characters, and the audience with them, to the conclusion that it’s not only fine, but actually the right move to swallow your morals and go work for the bad guys just for the sake of increasing your own net-worth. We learn that the environment is not worth fighting to save. We learn that protestors are bored spoiled rich housewives who will only learn their lesson if you ignore them. And we learn over and over and over and over again that women are objects that only exist in context to how men feel about them. Like seriously, re-watching it again I realized it really is maybe the most sexist show I’ve ever seen. Like I mean I know NPH’s whole thing is that he’s a horrible misogynist, and that’s like, the joke. I still don’t get why that’s supposed to be funny, but at least they’re doing it intentionally. But then Ted is supposed to be like, the sweet guy, and he’s just as disgusting. I mean Barney’s goal is to have one-night-stands and Ted’s goal is to settle down, but neither of them treat women like real people in pursuit of that goal. Ted doesn’t try to get to know the women he dates, he just barrels in head first with crazy romantic gestures, declares his love before he’s even sure he feels it, then changes his mind on a dime and just throws the girl aside with zero regard for her feelings, and moves onto the next one. And we’re supposed to feel sorry for him, like “oh boy, it’s just so hard to be a romantic these days! When is he gonna find Mrs. Right?” And that’s not even counting all the specific horrible things he’s done, like cheating, or lying, or manipulating, or when he broke up with a girl on her birthday, completely devastated her, waited for her to put her life back together again, begged her to take him back, and then immediately dumped her again, ALSO ON HER BIRTHDAY.
But again I’m sure there’s a million articles on why How I Met Your Mother is sexist, and why Ted specifically should be the poster boy for the least healthy behaviour one could possibly exhibit when trying to court the opposite sex. And as rich a topic as it is, I really just wanted to shine a light on this specific issue I found. Because it’s easy to forget how much fiction influences us. How much books, and movies, and TV shows form our view of the world. How many things did you have no idea about until you saw them on TV? How many of your opinions about history, or morality, or humour, came from the movies you grew up watching? This stuff shapes our brains. There’s an entire school of thought that says the reason we had flip phones back in the day was because that’s the way the communicators on Star Trek opened. Either consciously or unconsciously, the people who designed the first cell phones grew up believing that’s what a portable phone would look like, and so it came true. The right piece of fiction, if it hits the right way, if it enters the public consciousness and sticks there for long enough, can change the minds of an entire generation. It can change reality.
And I know that in this day and age we know to be very wary of the media. We’re constantly taught to not take things we read on facebook as fact, to always check sources, to acknowledge the bias of certain news organizations. But we forget that all our favourite sitcoms and movie franchises are just as susceptible to the taint and influence of grubby corporate agendas and misinformation. So as someone who has spent his entire life trying to mimic characters on television because trying to find a genuine individual identity was always terrifying and unattainable, let me share a lesson it’s taken me a very long time to learn: TV isn’t always right. It’s so easy to become enamoured with a show or character and begin to adopt it’s ideals into your personality without even realizing it. And that can be really dangerous if you don’t know where those ideas are coming from. So while everybody’s at home binge-watching stupid crap, I just wanted to re-iterate the importance of trying to remain objective. Every once in a while just pause the episode of Star Trek: Picard that you’re watching and try to think about what it’s actually trying to say, and whether those are things you actually agree with or not. Or, you know, don’t. I’m not your mom.
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