Ted

Should Seth MacFarlane apologize to everybody else?

It’s a stuffed animal house

One thing I was keeping an eye out for in the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother is whether they’d continue the trend they (unconsciously) started last year, of having Ted (Josh Radnor) be selfish, immature, and kind of a jerk. He did not disappoint: knowing nothing about the woman he’s going to marry, committing criminal negligence, and becoming freakishly obsessed with whether or not she likes Star Wars is an impressive tally for one episode, and continues his devolution into, as he put it tonight, “15 year-old me.” Barney is now officially a more mature and compassionate character than Ted.

Back when Television Without Pity was called something else, first Dawson’s Wrap and then Mighty Big TV, and was a lot better than it is now (not everything is ruined by popularity, but Mighty Big TV was a lot nastier and funnier than what it’s become over the years), they specialized in vicious recaps of Dawson’s Creek, and, in particular, pointing out that the supposed hero was actually a colossal douche. The idea was that the stuff that the writers thought made him heroic, or interesting, or superior, actually made him seem like a self-righteous jerk. Another character like that was Brandon on 90210. If a character is acting in ways that would make you want to smack him in real life, the site asked, why is he the hero?