How I Met Your Mother: The Front Porch
By fred | March 17, 2009
(S04E17) How I Met Your Mother can be really awesome, it can be an awesome, hilarious sitcom, and the way it does that is by being everything but, a sitcom. It doesn’t do the usual sitcomesque things that most sitcoms out there will do, instead it creates new ways of telling stories, it plays with time, goes into the past, the future, gives different angles of the same event, or spends an entire episode where, if you look closely, nothing happens but friends sitting in a bar, talking.
That’s how it does thing, and that is – or can be – just awesome. The perfect example was last week, with an episode which was exactly what you expect from the show and why you love it so much. This week, it wasn’t in a bar but back at the apartment, but it was again a case of friends chatting the whole night and nothing else, more or less. Yet, it didn’t really work for me…
Maybe others won’t have been bothered by it so much, but I didn’t like this episode very much. For one, the whole mess with Robin was too much and too sitcomesque. Of course when they’re all supposed to be watching they have the TV on, but no one ever sees anything, not when she weeps while showing a picture of them, not when someone is on fire, not when someone dies from a heart attack live on TV - because you never cut to commercials when such a thing happens, or when the host of the morning show delivers a baby!
The idea of the joke in itself is cliché, and they just kept pushing and pushing and it was just too much for me, it wasn’t funny but ludicrous, and not in a good way, it is not what I expect to see from this show, I expect more laughs with less stupid silliness. It just didn’t do it, and quite frankly neither did the whole plot of Barney giving up the “suitjamas” for a nightshirt (or a dress, as he called it).
It was funny to see him have to check his pulse when he first saw Marshall, but after that it lost its appeal to me. Things like Barney begging everyone to calm down as they start yelling at each other, only to ask about his newly found freedom is too much of a boring sitcom move for me to find it funny.
And then there’s Ted. There’s the fact that he was so pissed and yelled that much at Lilly for breaking her & Robin up, when she really did not. I’m sorry, but I only saw her asking each of them a rather simple and legitimate question. She didn’t trick any of them into anything, she didn’t lied to any of them, she did manipulate them at all, she just had them to think about their situation. Some would say it’s good to have friends like this, who can make you think for a minute, have a deeper look at the big picture before you jump into something without thinking it through.
Ted just seemed like a jerk to me at some point – and really, if finding a CD is enough a reason to break up with someone, who’s to blame for the breakup? – and not only to Lilly. But first, we had the whole Ted & Robin coming back, and I really hated that. Not because them getting back together would get us away from the mother, I couldn’t care less about that, but we do know there is no way they end up together anyways, so please…
But because, to continue with not addressing the one issue eating all fans up, Ted knows Barney is in love with Robin!! And that look he and Robin exchanged, like now they’re in a different situations and maybe they could get back together… doesn’t Ted care that Barney (yes, Barney Stinson!) is in love with her? Doesn’t it mean anything? Was it just me to be annoyed that the show even pretended they could go back there, while we all know how Barney feels, Barney who was in the other room (Lilly sleeps in the floor I guess) dreaming of marriage (!!) and probably being the one “who didn’t grow up to be the man he wants to be,” maybe wondering if he should/could change for his beloved Robin…
I don’t know, but while this episode wasn’t that bad and things did make me laughs, overall I wasn’t too pleased with it. I also hated the Ted/Robin thing, as little as it may have been, and I’m really getting annoyed that everybody knows how Barney feels and yet nothing happens at all. It’s not like the quest for the mother (who’s just an excuse to have a show), here we’re talking about continuity, about the characters not acting like they should or would, and it just feels wrong.
What did everybody else think?
Posted in Reviews
Shows: How I Met Your Mother
