Quick spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother: To its credit, How I Met Your Mother has pushed its characters this season with some real and challenging developments: Barney’s finding his father, Marshall losing his, Marshall and Lily deciding to have a baby, then apparently deciding not to. But HIMYM has always felt [...]

Quick spoilers for last nights How I Met Your Mother coming up: After Marshall’s father died, he returned home to Minnesota, as he described it, to help his mother out. As last night’s episode, “Desperation Day,” showed, there was much more to it than that: he was really going back home, in the end, to [...]

Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother following: The moment that “Oh Honey” indicated it would focus on Zoey, I actually exclaimed aloud, “I do not give a crap* about Zoey!” (*Quotation bowdlerized for MSM-website standards.) So you probably have a sense of where I stand on the Zoey-Ted relationship. It’s not that [...]

Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up: When the last episode of How I Met Your Mother ended with Marshall getting the news of his father’s sudden death, I gave the show credit for, unlike many sitcoms, being willing to engage real emotions and not-so-funny passages in life. It’s one thing, [...]

Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up: A couple of things that distinguish How I Met Your Mother as a sitcom are its love of throwing in Easter eggs that reward attention, and its willingness to ground its comedy in serious, even dramatic, personal stories. “Bad News” showcased both traits, though [...]

Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up: So from the moment I learned that “Glitter” would be a Robin Sparkles episode of HIMYM, I had to figure that it was going to be—as the hilarious first and the not-as-hilarious second one were designed to be—a one-joke episode. And it was. But [...]

Spoilers for How I Met Your Mother coming up: I’ve taken a break from the HIMYM Watch here, until the show started producing some episodes I had much to say about, which is to say episodes that began treating the characters again like real people with ongoing challenges and goals. But when I talk about [...]

Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up: The character of Barney is a gift an a challenge for How I Met Your Mother. On the one hand, he’s hilarious, Neil Patrick Harris plays him brilliantly and he has largely put the show on the larger pop-cultural map. On the other hand, [...]

Spoilers for last night’s season premiere of How I Met Your Mother coming up: When last we left HIMYM Watch, your humble narrator was close to giving up. For four seasons I’d adored the show, love the characters, the quick humor, the play, the nonlinear storytelling and the commitment to Ted’s quest for love. Last [...]