Monsters of Television

“There are 2 big days in any love story.”

I’m understandably weary of How I Met Your Mother after being bloodied and bruised last season. I put it on warning that it needed to step up its game if even wanted me to be writing about it every week, let alone watching it. And while I know my warnings mean a whole lot to the show (I have a ton of clout, after all), I figured them too arrogant to take my word on thing.

I’m pretty happy to report that the sixth season premiere helped erase doubts with, essentially, a bottle episode (a rare thing for a premiere, yes?) (also, I use the term bottle episode as would be best applied for HIMYM, not another, less cut-away jokey show). I’m still a little cautious (they burned me so hard last season), but the episodes provides an umbrella to the pessimism storm.

And umbrellas are important. Read more »

“It’s just so much easier to let the Universe decide.”

Maybe that’s the mentality the show has decided to take, because it’s the only thing that makes sense. I imagine a conversation in the writers room goes something like this:

“So we get Robin and Barney together until Hippie Intern wears a tie!”

“Perfect!”

2 months later…

“Guys! Hippie Intern is wearing a tie!”

“Gotta break ’em up. Call Alan Thicke!”

Perhaps my annoyance at “Doppelgangers” is that I found the preceding episode to appear so promising, a return to form. And instead I get an episode where Ted dyes his hair, Barney ends up encouraging kids for Marshall and Lily (the true protagonists of this show, I’ve decided), and the show tries to pass this off as growth, but it’s growth the show can’t fully claim.
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“The ‘but’ is that there’s always a ‘but.’“

[insert my intro from last week’s 30 Rock here].

It’s like the shows that I used to really love finally heard my complaints and decided to shape up for their last two episodes. Well, kind of shape up anyway. I mean, it’s hard to binge on mediocre to downright awful episodes and then shimmy into that suit or wedding dress that is the season finale. And it’s question that I think we all need to grapple with, regardless of the show we’re watching: Does a good run up to the season finale (and hopefully a good season finale) make up for a lousy season, or at the very least, grant a stay of execution for that show from your schedule for the next season? Read more »

“willem. DAFOOOOOOOOOOE!”

When did “douchey” become synonymous with “pretentious”? Did I miss that new edition of the thesaurus? “Robots Vs. Wrestlers” sets up this relationship pretty quickly, and as a result the episode engages in some not-so-subtle class conversations (you don’t get any less subtle than naming Michael York’s character Jefferson Van Smoot). But they’re not fully developed or developed in a way that makes a lot of sense. And then there’s the newest show ultimatum that doesn’t really work either. And Robin’s unmotivated return to the group at the end of the episode.

There are still a number of funny bits in “Robots Vs. Wrestlers,” but the episode as a whole is a bit of a mixed bag. Read more »

“A dirty dirty sex bed.”

Oh, hey, it’s that show I haven’t written about in two episodes. Is it still on? I could’ve sworn that shows stopped airing when I stopped writing about them (as a result, I have no idea how Nick has managed to just magically create episodes of White Collar or Parenthood to review).

Tonight’s HIMYM is odd in a couple of ways. First is my realization that the show has essentially become Scrubs and second is that I’m not entirely sure that the show earns its ending. It’s certainly sentimental, and it should have some emotional heft to it, but I feel like the show has veered too far away from where it once was to really make it work (plus it’s directed at the wrong character). Read more »

“Let’s take a little stroll down Shank Lane.”

Tonight’s HIMYM is one of those episodes where the group, prompted by an outsider joining their ranks for an evening, waxes nostalgic about earlier times. These episodes are the show’s bread and butter. The tradition started back in season 1 with “Game Night.” The crew, motivated by learning more about Victoria (I miss her), organized a game night around embarrassing stories that culminated in a lot of great Barney material set before his Awesome era, including his Muppet walk and giving of High Twos.

Episodes like “Game Night” enhance our understanding of the characters and their pasts as both individuals and as a group. “Say Cheese” should achieve the same thing, but it’s a less enjoyable achievement than others in this vein since it wants to interrogate what happens to friendships when things aren’t all rosy. It’s a decent enough episode, and a good variation on the premise the show often visits, but I just feel it didn’t go enough in that variation to be totally successful. Read more »

“So unobservant.”

I, along with many others, have been pummeling How I Met Your Mother for the past 10 episodes due to their mishandling over the Barney/Robin break-up. No fall out, barely an acknowledgement of it. Barney went back to being Barney and Robin went back to thinking she was the prettiest girl in the room and being a bit oblivious.

It turns out that we, the audience, were the oblivious ones (along with Ted, Marshall, and Barney). Robin was going through a mourning period off-screen for months now (four to be exact), and it all came to a head after Barney compared a random hook-up as a “younger Robin” with bigger, shapelier breasts.

Now I have to get vomit stains out of the inside of my stormtrooper helmet (sadly that’s not the first time I’ve typed that sentence).

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“I’m just a jerk!”

I can normally get behind the social/dating stuff that the show rolls out fairly easily. Slap Bet. The Hot/Crazy scale. The Bro Code. The Lemon Law. The Platinum Rule. The Naked Man.  But this season has been a bit blah. Like “The Sexless Innkeeper,”  “Hooked” feels like a neat idea, but the concept doesn’t get exploited for enough laughs.

Hooked refers to stringing along someone that you have no intention of being with, but you keep them near you with the “one day” or “just not right now” line. It’s a relatable concept, as I’m sure many people have done this and/or have had it done to them, but the show fails to latch onto how these situations are funny: seeing the past versions of the characters experience the social trope in play.

It’s frustrating because they show hints at it, as we see Marshall in his teenage years, swooning for some girl, only to being totally ignored and buried in snow, the potential past experiences that could be mined for comedy gold. Instead we get that one bit, Ted being cruel to a woman from the university’s library (who looks like Shelley Duvall’s much younger sister) in his attempt to hook up with Carrie Underwood, and the other bit of Lily attempting to finally break things off with Scooter (and Robin leading on Mike the Cameraman).

The episode is, frankly, prime idea for Seinfeld, with its cast of misanthropic characters, and in a show where all the jokes would end up converging at the end, the pay off could be impressive. But on HIMYM, the characters aren’t as vain or self-absorbed as the characters from Seinfeld (except maybe Robin). So while the show acknowledges Ted’s cruelty to library woman by having Future Ted pause the narrative and yell, it never fully works because the show hasn’t earned Ted as being this jerk-like (he can be a bit of a jerk though).

Lily’s attempts to finally let Scooter off the hook is simply weird due to the presence of the teacup pig (is that a thing?), whose adorable stare parallels that of Scooter’s. Eventually the Lily is able to say no to the pig, and thus to Scooter, but the journey to get there is frankly a bit off the mark.

As the episode finished, I realized that the show has its audience on a hook. “We’re not going to show you the mother. But maybe one day…” And thus we keep giving the show foot massages, baking it cakes, and cuddling with it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• Barney’s discussion of pharmaceutical girls would be funny if Scrubs hadn’t done a similar idea back with Heather Locklear back in the day.
• To that end, I’m sure Barney is a pro at hooking women. I would’ve loved to have seen some of that.
• The show just loves having awkward and pudgy Jason Segel become his teenage self. And I love it, too.
• I flipped over to NBC thinking that Law & Order was about to start, and caught the half-hour break of Chuck. I watched long enough to realize that poor Shaw is on Sarah’s hook (at least up to the point that I watched).
• Scooter remains awesomely creepy.

I’m not a fan of the mockumentary sitcom. It’s become a barrier of entry for me with shows like Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. Indeed, I think it’s a crutch that sitcoms are starting to rely on, much to their detriment. I was going to let my dislike of the format speak through my silence on the shows.

But then Matthew Gilbert over at the Boston Globe had to go and poke the bear. Gilbert extolls the format for providing the “still-needed alternative for the sitcom genre as a whole” and for shows that use the format as the “essential weapons in the battle against sitcom predictability.” And he pays the shows that use the format the ultimate compliment by declaring them “anti-sitcoms.”

At this point, I feel it’s best to crank the laugh track dial up to 11. Read more »

“Magic phone, guys. Magic. Phone.”

After last week’s lackluster performance, I was happy to see HIMYM getting back to fighting form, with a narrative trajectory that (mostly) came together and one that, I think, may finally be leading to something of a resolution concerning Robin and Barney’s break-up from the start of the season.

So, the question is: Rabbit season or duck season? Read more »