WRITING LESSON: Sitcom Romance - A Look at How HIMYM Shit the Bed
Something I’ve been wanting to do in my blog for years now (literally, I started writing this article in 2020) is talk about 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 for some time now. Of course, everything is subjective and everyone is welcome to enjoy whatever they want, but the ending to that show really let me down and I’ve been wanting to talk a bit about it for years at this point. The time is finally nigh!
Romance is, I think, one of the hardest things to write well. Plain and simple, romance stories have been around forever and we’ve heard all the variations, so all the modern world can do to make romance interesting is to keep it relevant to what we, as human beings, are feeling in the current world as we evolve and the things that intrigue us and make us feel things change. Are most modern romances original? No. Yet I believe they can 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 talk a lot of about 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 in this post!
So 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 cool 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 ending is not in-keeping with the name or game of the series. 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 as a contrast - while the endgame romance was about Rachel and Ross, the show is not about them as a couple, it’s 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 story preconception that’s being broken by that choice. HIMYM was specifically written to be a tale of a father telling his children how he met their mother, so there is an inherent idea set up straight away 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.
Robin and Barney’s break-up was half-assed. 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 (save the final episode) was putting together the pieces that helped the viewers* believe in this marriage. Then, once they put all that time and effort into getting the viewers to back 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 (for a really lame reason) or missing her while she was gone (slightly unrealistic in a relationship with two people who probably like a lot of personal space). 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. Never at any point in the story had Barney shown any stress over being away nor aversion to travel. For someone who goes to extreme lengths to successfully hook up, as well as considering his corporate job, it’s not unrealistic to think he’d probably travel for work quite a bit himself. Even more on point, is that from the very beginning, Robin had shown an interest in travel so we always knew that would be in her future. They could have made a problem of Barney’s wandering eye, or gone deeper into what he’s doing with himself now that he’s not doing PLEASE anymore. But their divorce amounts to little more than “this isn’t working anymore,” which feels like 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. To put it plainly, that would have been a beautiful ending if it had not been a full deus ex machina because they spent all that time telling the story of how Robin was Barney’s true love. In fact, having the baby being his true love after having married a sterile woman could be taken as quite offensive to Robin’s character. This and the fact that he instantly reverts to his womanizing ways amount to his relationship with Robin having meant next to nothing in the long run, especially as his reversion of character is actively shown bothering Robin in the final episode at the Halloween party.
Robin was secretly in love with Ted all along. On this note, I full-on call bullhonkey. 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 in the end so badly seems weird and out of place. Not to mention having her pining so desperately over him in the years to come makes her character come off as weaker than she had been the entire series prior.
The whole thing is offensive to Tracy. Tracy is built up through the entire show 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. It suggests that despite having found his one true love, his soulmate, that Ted has always loved Robin. It completely undermines the fact that Tracy was his wife, the one that he finally found after all of those years of waiting for the right person. His struggle paid off! So having him secretly pine after Robin the whole time kind of makes the entire story offensive to his late wife.
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, like Robin cutting 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 it’s pretty much literally the point of the story 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. 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 sad and lonely 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. However, he finds true happiness with a baby. 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.
Let’s compare Rachel and Ross again. After the initial growth of mutual romantic interest, once these two were in a relationship, their first break-up 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 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’s story, which I didn’t much care about). 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 together this whole time. Once again, nothing flawed in the concept and even if there was, these two aren’t the main characters that you’re fixated on anyways.
Robin and Ted, on the other hand, are always apart for extremely good reasons. Robin wanted to travel and didn’t want to have kids. Ted loves New York and can’t wait to have a family. Those are perfectly good reasons for a couple who love each other to separate and not get back together despite love and mutual attraction. As such, as viewers, we weren’t given any reason to root for them to get together because their break-up made so much sense. What reason did we have to want them to stay together if they didn’t want the same life? How are we expected to root for them when we know that them being together would result in either Ted being unhappy over being unable to have children, or Robin being unhappy over having children and being unable to live her 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 because 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 never, ever gives you any reason to root for the two of them as a couple. There’s legitimately 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 like. In the end? She’s just not into it. It’s like the writers themselves don’t 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 light of how unlikeable their main characters and their relationship are.
So what would I have done to make this story better? Well 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 this premise going, we have to remove the “mother is dead and Ted is asking his kids permission to ask out Robin” from the equation completely. Then we have a show about a group of friends living their lives as one of them (Ted) desperately tries to find someone to spend his life 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.
You can keep the original Ted and Robin romance in the mix as well, since Ted and Robin meeting is what leads Robin and Barney to get married, and Ted eventually meeting Tracy, but I would leave out any and all mention of a 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 actually be friends without there being more going on.
Then Robin and Barney 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. Here, 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 progression in this sense (the only reason it’s really relevant now is because she was technically always right about him - another thing I didn’t like). 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 that series of things happening that led him to their mother after all.
Back to Robin and Barney then, we have the couple who would be HIMYM’s version Rachel and Ross. 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 more interested in trying relationships, but fail 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 can’t and doesn’t want to have children. This drives home the same reason she and Ted broke up and can help push her and Barney back together in that he never comes across as someone who needs or wants children… that Robin alone is, in fact, enough for him.
So as Ted continues his quest through the wrong relationships that lead him to the right place, Barney could have his relationship with Quinn again as well, the fully untrusting relationship that also puts a sort of kibosh on his womanizing ways and helps him realize what it means to trust. He’s fully done with sleeping around and Robin’s coming to terms with the realization that a lot of men want children and her options just got a lot more limited. Here, we can slowly start pushing them back together. The last season could be less about trying to deceive the audience with its intents and more about driving home that Barney has grown to become 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 premier 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, what’s really funny is that you can actually find an alternate ending for the show that more or less tells exactly this version of the story!
* 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
