How I Met Your Mother

The How I Met Your Mother finale has aired, and Jaime Weinman has some spoiler-filled thoughts.

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Adventurous and inventive, the cheesy-looking How I Met Your Mother redefined what a sitcom can be

Watching last night’s How I Met Your Mother, I was not pleased – though I wasn’t inspired to the heights of invective that Alan Sepinwall reaches in this post, where he devastatingly lists everything that has been wrong with the Zoey arc and the Zoey character this season.

Because canned laughter is mostly a thing of the past, most “without laugh track” clips are really nothing of the kind (just audience laughter muted). But this extended scene from last night’s How I Met Your Mother actually is without the laugh track, provided by an audience watching the finished episode. So here’s what it’s like.

The “How I Met Your Mother goes to Toronto” bit last night (actually, “How I Met Your Mother goes to a Tim Horton’s set built at the Fox studio”) was great fun, probably because it wasn’t over-hyped in advance like “The Simpsons goes to Toronto” or “The Office goes to Winnipeg.” The show makes so much fun of Canada and Robin’s Canadian-ness that Canadian networks can’t really hype it that much; for one thing, it’s not a special event when they make Canada jokes, and for another thing, there’s always going to be someone — usually Barney — making jokes about how lame Canada is. Though last night, he got his comeuppance. (A word that Barney could probably turn into a suggestive joke, come to think of it.)

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The new season of How I Met Your Mother started tonight, so you might want to check out Hitfix’s interview with co-creator Carter Bays. He talks mostly about the themes of last season — mostly, putting Ted through a lot of bad stuff, dropping obviously false hints about who The Mother might be, and hiding two pregnancies in very awkward ways — but does mention a few things planned for this season, particularly one thing that became apparent in the season premiere: Ted is going to be more well-adjusted and happy than last year. Whether this is considered pleasing, or just an excuse for him to be an even more annoying person than he usually is (he sometimes turns human in episodes where he is made to suffer, particularly the memorable “Shelter Island”), is for the viewer to decide.

The second and third-most-popular CBS comedies had a little too much of, respectively: Penny/Leonard (can’t they just leave him at the North Pole and give Penny and Sheldon more time for hilarious bits like the door-knocking routine?) and Ted (not a bad episode, but why spend a whole half-hour on a relationship nobody cared about and a creepy, self-loving lead character who pities himself because true love hasn’t come to him by the time he’s 30?).

The official TV listings for last night’s HIMYM had this description:

Every successful show inspires imitators, but How I Met Your Mother hasn’t had many imitators — probably because until 2008, it wasn’t actually a success. Now that it has achieved something resembling hit status, NBC has picked up what appears to be a somewhat similar show, “100 Questions.” (Originally titled “100 Questions for Charlotte Payne.”) The New York Times has the preview clip of this show, about a young woman who goes to a dating service where they try and find your perfect mate by asking you very personal questions about yourself and your love life. The format, according to early reviews, is something like this: every week the lead character is asked a question, and in the process of answering the question, she tells a story from her life or the lives of her young friends. The question from the pilot is “are you an honest person?”