WRITING LESSON: Sitcom Romance - A Look at How HIMYM Shit the Bed
Something I’ve been wanting to talk about for years now is writing and what (I believe) sets the standard for great writing… or at least what qualifies as terrible writing. At the same time, I’ve also wanted to write an essay on the finale of How I Met Your Mother. Of course, all media is subjective in the end, but How I Met Your Mother didn’t just have a bad ending, per se — it simply completely undermined its entire premise. It’s one thing to surprise audiences but it’s a whole other to invalidate nine seasons of storytelling. Let’s talk about why HIMYM shit the bed so hard and how it could have been saved.
Writing Sitcom Romance Is Tough
Romance is, I think, one of the hardest things to write well nowadays. Plain and simple, romance stories have been around forever and we’ve heard all the variations, so all the modern world feels like it can do to keep romance interesting is to update it to what’s relevant as we and the things that intrigue us evolve. Are most modern romances original? No. Yet I believe they could be, and I don’t just mean to achieve that by adding more queerness and diversity (though we should always, definitely be adding more queerness/diversity, because let’s not lie, Heartstopper was an absolute delight).
I’m going to reference a few sitcoms here, namely the aforementioned HIMYM, but I’ll also refer to Friends, The Big Bang Theory, and New Girl… so beware, romance spoilers for all of these shows will be included!
The Missteps
Since the show concluded in 2014, most people know by now how HIMYM ended: the mother is dead and Ted is really telling this story to his children to convince them that it’s okay for him to try to get back together with Robin. This was a problematic ending for about a thousand reasons, but here are a few of the ones that needled me the most:
The show’s ending is fully out of step with its own premise. The story is called How I Met Your *Mother*. Inherently, the story should, then, be a love story between Ted and Tracy, not Ted and Robin. Take Friends in contrast — while the endgame romance was about Rachel and Ross, the show’s premise was not about them as a couple, it was about the friendship between their group… ergo, Friends. The relationship between those two characters is a side story, one of many ongoing threads in the interconnected lives of these characters. So if the writers had decided to, say, hook Rachel and Joey up, or some other alternate ending, there is no preconception that’s being broken by that decision. HIMYM, on the other hand, was specifically written to be the tale of a father telling his children how he met their mother, so there is an immediate inherent premise that this is a love story about Ted and his eventual wife. Having the real underlying story be about how Old Ted really just wants to get back together with Robin is, plain and simple, disappointing. They spent 9 seasons building up to the great reveal of this mother, only to have her be a sidenote in the overall story. Someday I’ll talk about surprise vs subversion of expectation, but ultimately, you simply can’t give viewers the impression that the story is one thing when it’s another. The name set expectations for us and the finale did not deliver, thus the great disappointment.
The writing surrounding Robin and Barney’s break-up was completely half-assed because none of the problems were foreshadowed. They spend a huge amount of time convincing us that Robin and Barney belong together, and then immediately shit on it. A big chunk of season 8 was about Barney being in love with Robin and all of season 9 (minus the final episode) was about putting together the pieces that helped the viewers believe* in this marriage. Then, once they put all that time and effort into backing this couple, they break them up for an utterly redundant reason: Robin was working overseas too much and Barney, now unemployed, didn’t enjoy being on the road with her (why?) or missed her while she was gone (really?). There is so much background built around these two characters. They could have found countless more appropriate ways to break these two up. Instead, they chose something that had not been remotely foreshadowed in any way: Barney doesn’t like to travel.
… Barney once flew to Argentina just to avoid feeling sad for a weekend. This man had zero issues disappearing for his own whims, but suddenly, he can’t handle traveling for his marriage? That’s not just lazy writing… that’s Jaime Lannister levels of character betrayal. No wonder people felt like this was a cop-out after dedicating a season and a half to these two promising to work together no matter what.
Barney’s true love was, in the end, a daughter. Barney’s true love wasn’t Robin, it was a random baby who didn’t even exist when he vowed to spend his life with her. After years of telling us Robin was ‘the one’ for Barney, the writers decided the real happy ending for him was fatherhood — something Robin, by design, could never give him. So what was the point of their entire arc?
Robin was secretly in love with Ted all along. On this note, I full-on call bull honkey. There is nothing at any point that indicates that Robin still has feelings for Ted, and even though she considers getting back together with him in a moment of heartbreak and weakness, she ultimately turns him down. In fact, Robin seems to never really get over Barney after their first break-up, creating an imbalance in that Ted is pining for Robin but Robin is pining for Barney. As such, in the final episode (and even the episode prior when she wants Ted to run away with her), her suddenly wanting Ted feels weird and out of place. Making it weirder, she pines so desperately over Ted in the years to come that it makes her character into exactly the half-assed stereotype she so badly wanted to avoid becoming. So what’s the message? That Robin’s dream career, travels, and independence meant nothing because she didn’t get the guy? [insert vomit here]
The whole thing is offensive to Tracy. Tracy is built up through nine seasons to be Ted’s soulmate and when we finally meet her in the final season, they drive it home hard by showing all the quirks they have in common, from driving gloves to Renaissance fair weaponry… the works. Against that, the ending suggests that, despite having found his one true love, his soulmate… Ted has always loved Robin. It completely undermines the fact that Tracy was the one. The one that he finally found after all of those years of waiting for the right person. His persistence paid off! So having him secretly long for Robin the whole time kind of makes the entire story offensive to his wife’s memory.
‘Exes can’t be friends without wanting more.’ This is proven to be the show’s belief because no one remains friends with exes without it causing some sort of romantic drama or having deeper meanings. Robin cuts off her friendships with Ted and Barney at some point because they got drunk and tried to win her back from Don. Normally I wouldn’t care about this too much, but this point so heavily underlies this entire show and, as someone who gets along with almost all of her exes, I can attest to the fact that it’s not true and would love to see any media dare to agree with me and show it.
Everything else. There are quite a few things that ended up being problematic in the final episode, and here are just a few more. Robin went from a strong, independent businesswoman to someone who can’t handle being around her exes (even though she just spent a decade hanging out with them) and is lonely and dissatisfied despite living her dream. Lily’s future as an art consultant is hardly mentioned; instead, she’s just having more children. Barney’s emotional development goes fully out the window as he reverts to sleeping with dumb young women. It seems only the men are actively living out the future they want: Ted and Marshall get their families; Marshall becomes a judge and Ted and Tracy click easily.
There are more, but this covers enough.
Now that we’ve gone over some of the most problematic issues in the ending, how and why did HIMYM shit the bed so badly? I offer a simple solution: Robin and Ted never had a good reason to be in love or end up together.
Betraying the Premise
Imagine you’re watching a show called How I Became a Doctor. The show spends a great deal of time talking about all of the education the main character goes through, the struggles, the hardships of residency, all of that, and then in the last episode, the show ends with the character saying, “… and that’s how I became a chemistry teacher.”
… Wait, what?
This is exactly what happened with How I Met Your Mother. They spent nine seasons of the show telling us that Ted and Tracy were not just soulmates, but cosmic soulmates that required the exact perfect timing to get together and have their amazing, wonderful family… only to find out that the story the whole time had absolutely nothing to do with Tracy at all.
Honestly, the reasoning for this is probably simple for Hollywood: they came up with the first and last episodes’ content when the show was launched and they probably didn’t expect it to last more than a few seasons. Instead, it did reach Friends-level fame and went on to last nine seasons, which meant that they had to bloat the middle and prolong some things (well, no, they didn’t have to, but that’s what they did). That’s the funny thing with a premise that’s not flexible… sometimes the idea you started with doesn’t work after all the extra fluff you added in the middle. And that’s okay! But it’s not okay when you refuse to let the story breathe on its own and undermine it in the process.
Romantic Arcs in Sitcoms
Let’s compare Rachel and Ross again. After the initial growth of mutual romantic interest, once these two were in a relationship, their first breakup was related to Ross’ jealousy, Rachel’s work stress, and the two issues not meshing well together, resulting in the infamous break where Ross sought comfort in another woman. When they tried to get back together, Rachel refused to take any responsibility for what happened. They almost get back together again (after Emma is born), but Ross doesn’t pass on the message from a guy at the bar. This pattern of immaturity, insecurity, miscommunication, and so forth, is what constantly keeps these two apart despite their mutual love and attraction over the 10 seasons of the show. Ross and Rachel are never truly apart for a good reason per se, they are apart because of their own personal hang-ups, life circumstances, etc.
We see a similar pattern with Schmidt and Cici from New Girl (I use the example of Cici and Schmidt because I found them far more endearing than Jess and Nick). Cici starts out finding Schmidt annoying (as is only right), but he wins her over and they become fuck-buddies and eventually start dating. They break up because he’s scared of being in love and committed. They stay broken up because Cici tries to do things the traditional Indian way. Then a variety of other shenanigans and relationships keep them apart, until they realize that they’ve wanted to be with each other the whole time. Once again, nothing flawed in the concept and even if there was, these two were side-characters and thus lower stakes in the grand spectrum of the overall show.
Where Ted and Robin Differ
Robin and Ted, on the other hand, are always apart for extremely good reasons. Robin wanted travel and a career. Ted wanted kids and a family. This was portrayed as something that couldn’t be sorted out with compromise — it was a fundamental incompatibility. The show spent nine seasons proving that their breakup made sense, only to then try to gaslight you into thinking it didn’t. The characters had both moved on, so putting them back together wasn’t romantic, it was a complete regression.
As such, as viewers, we weren’t given any reason to root for them to get back together. Why would we want to see our beloved characters while away their lives in bitter misery after one of them compromised something crucial for the other’s dreams? It just doesn’t make sense on an emotional level.
This brings me around to the main reason why I hate The Big Bang Theory so much (…okay, the main reason is that it is clearly laughing at geeks and not with them like it’s pretending, but this here is a close second): Leonard and Penny are the worst couple in modern television history. The show is entirely centered around the totally wild (yes, sarcasm) concept of a ‘lonely nerd’ trope getting a ‘hot chick’ trope, but it never ever gives you any reason to root for the two of them as a couple. There’s even one episode where Leonard recognizes that they have nothing in common and offers to show Penny Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after putting in some effort to find something he thought she’d actually enjoy. In the end? She’s still not into it. It’s like the writers themselves don’t even believe the story they’re writing could be true.
Meanwhile, we get introduced to characters like Alex [Sheldon’s assistant for a short period of time], who thinks Leonard is cute, works in physics, and is perfectly beautiful if less “hot,” but also connects with him on an intellectual level and respects his work. Why on earth weren’t we meant to be rooting for that couple? Well, because the showrunners wanted to keep making a joke of how ridiculous they think it is for Leonard and Penny to stay together.
How I Would Have Done It
So let’s talk shop. What if HIMYM had actually honored the core of its premise? What if, instead of forcing a predetermined ending that no longer made sense, the show had followed its natural emotional arc? What would an ending that feels earned have felt like for the series?
First of all, the whole “how I met your mother” premise does not work at all if this is a story about Robin and Ted. So if we wanted to keep the original premise, we have to remove the “mother is dead and Ted is asking his kids permission to ask out Robin” from the equation completely. Now we have a show about a group of friends living their lives as one of them (Ted) desperately tries to find someone to settle down with. We have Lily and Marshall, the happy couple who are living out the realities of their happily ever after; Barney, the womanizer who has no interest in settling down; and Robin, the strong working woman with no great need for romance.
We’ll keep the original Ted and Robin romance in the mix as well, since their meet cute is what leads to Robin and Barney getting married, and thus Ted eventually meeting Tracy, but I would leave out any and all mention of continued romantic affection between those two characters as soon as they realize that they don’t want the same things. They broke up for a good reason — leave it at that and for once show that exes can be friends without there being ‘more going on.’
Robin and Barney still get together, but this would go down a bit differently. Rather than having Lily force them into a relationship (something I always found extremely inappropriate — people should be allowed to define their relationship if and when they’re ready), they start with an open relationship. This could go one of two ways: as a friend suggested, Robin might want to be exclusive but Barney would not be interested. I would, however, suggest the opposite: Barney actually feels something for Robin and wants to be exclusive, but Robin doesn’t trust him enough for that and they break up. This then returns them to the pattern of Barney womanizing and Robin diving back into her work dreams.
While this is happening, we continue to build Ted’s character and follow the threads of what leads him to be in the right place at the right time, while becoming the person he needs to be, so that when he finally meets Tracy, it just clicks.
At this point, we can trim out some of the fat: Victoria can go, since her story related to the suspicion that Ted still wants Robin and thus adds nothing to his character progress. Zoey can also go because she likewise never pushed the narrative about meeting the mother forward (the showrunners said she was never an option for the mother even during writing). However, Stella can stay, as meeting her and getting left at the altar is what led to Ted getting the job at the university, meeting and dating Cindy, having her get her ex-roommate to play at the wedding, and so on. This whole train of events of leading a person to the right place and the right time — something Old Ted rambles about regularly — is basically all about the incredible chain of events that led him to their mother at the end.
Robin and Barney are the couple who would represent HIMYM’s version of the Rachel and Ross ‘will-they won’t-they’ dynamic. Robin is struggling with the break-up, wondering if she made the right choice. Logically, she knows she shouldn’t trust him but kind of wishes she had tried. Barney, meanwhile, is struggling to find the same satisfaction in womanizing that he had before Robin. We can even keep the Nora/Kevin conundrum in there, having Barney interested in trying relationships but failing because he still has feelings for Robin, while Robin would choose Kevin over Barney in the same way — because he’s more trustworthy. They can also break up for the same reason — that Robin both can’t and doesn’t want to have children. This simultaneously drives home the same reason she and Ted broke up and can help push her and Barney back together. Barney never comes across as someone who needs or wants children so it’s completely believable that Robin alone is, in fact, enough for him.
As Ted stumbles through the wrong relationships on his way to Tracy, Barney can still have a relationship with Quinn. This relationship will force him to explore what it actually means to trust someone and be trustworthy, finally growing beyond his womanizing ways. At the same time, Robin is getting a clear view of the paths in front of her when it comes to partners and, whether fair or not, her options just got a lot more limited. Here, we can slowly start pushing them back together, as Barney never wanted the things Robin couldn’t give (namely, children). The last season could be less about trying to deceive the audience with its intents and more about driving home the fact that Barney has genuinely grown into a reliable human being.
Depending on where you want the series to end, you could cap it off with Ted and Tracy meeting at Robin and Barney’s wedding, or you could continue for another season to show how Robin and Barney get on after they get married and show Ted and Tracy clicking as they, at the end of the show, get engaged/married as well.
This then brings it all full circle in that Ted meeting Robin was the main catalyst for him meeting Tracy, thus being an appropriate beginning to the story of how Ted met the mother of his children.
And by the way, the funniest part? The official alternate ending proves the writers knew something was up. Turns out, they had the better version of the story in their pocket… they just didn’t have the guts to air it.
* I am aware that not all viewers were into this pairing or believed in it, but for the sake of simplicity, I feel like the majority of viewers still felt as though Robin+Barney made more sense than Robin+Ted
