That’s All, Folks: How I Met Your Mother’s Series Finale Finally Finished Its Decade-Long Anecdote

By Kenneth Lowe  |  October 23, 2023 | 11:15am
Photo Courtesy of CBS
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That’s All, Folks: How I Met Your Mother’s Series Finale Finally Finished Its Decade-Long Anecdote

Most scripted television shows end in cancellation, so there’s something special about the ones that get the chance to go out on their own terms. This year, Ken Lowe is revisiting some of the most influential TV shows that made it to an officially planned final episode. That’s All, Folks is a look back at television’s most unforgettable series finales.

I married later than almost every one of my friends. I told myself it was because I was waiting for the right one, or that my feelings about marriage are complicated by my family history, or that I wanted to bop around the world before settling down. I told myself that if I ever did get married, I wasn’t going to do it just because everybody was telling me to. But, man, everybody sure was telling me to.

The sitcom isn’t dead in American TV, whatever “American TV” means in these days of streaming and cable-cutting and 10-episode seasons that somehow still seem long, when syndication is less how we engage with older media than maintaining that streaming account for one more month or heaving a sigh and finally buying the Blu-Ray. But it isn’t anywhere nearly as prominent in the landscape, and it’s moved beyond just being about any old middle-class family or a group of friends hanging out (barring the ongoing popularity of The Big Bang Theory in syndication, according to Nielsen).

These days, you need more of a premise: Only Murders in the Building might qualify as a sitcom, but it also has an unfolding mystery. Abbott Elementary certainly does, but it’s also deeply tied in with the American public school system, just as Community was centered around a group of adults in the confounding liminal experience that is community college in America. No longer can you merely point a camera at a bunch of folks and watch their fussiness ruin their lives, or turn in another repeat of Home Improvement, a show it feels like I watched from Kindergarten up through senior year and yet can remember literally nothing about.

How I Met Your Mother is not the last sitcom, or even the last mostly decent one. (I argue it’s about 50/50 in quality.) It does have the distinction of being incredibly popular and unaccountably long-running, so much so that it straddled the era between the DVD and the eternally-renewing streaming subscription. It briefly wrestled for the honor of being this column’s representative of late aughts/early teens show with Two and a Half Men before a moment of sharp lucidity reminded me that there are limits to the misery I am willing to inflict on myself, even for the sake of you, Dear Reader. But the other reason it won is its premise, which was ostensibly more than just a guy recalling his bachelor days alongside his close-knit friend group.

A show founded on a burning question can be incredibly compelling, of course—but then you actually need to answer that question. And everybody wanted to know the answer to this show’s question: how did Ted meet his kids’ mother?

The Show

How I Met Your Mother is a show about failure, loneliness, wasted time, messy relationships (romantic and platonic and both), about the glowing ideals we hold about happily ever after and the sobering realization that there is no such thing. It is also about a group of young adult friends and their bullshit, and thanks to its framing device, it’s about the exaggerations and even outright lies we tell ourselves (and anybody who will listen) about the good old days. When it’s good, it’s great.

We join aspiring architect Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) at a turning point in his life. He’s been rooming with his best friends Lily (Allyson Hannigan) and Marshall (Jason Segel), and their engagement makes Ted realize that he’s still alone and doesn’t really have his life on track. He embarks on what nobody at the time knew would be a 10-season quest to get married and live happily ever after, with help from Lily, Marshall, and the womanizing Barney (Neil Patrick Harris, who is gay, performing the sort of nihilistic stereotypical straightness not seen since Dan Savage skewered The Suite Life of Zack and Cody). In the pilot, Ted meets the woman who the rest of his romantic journey will, one way or another, be defined by: Robin (Cobie Smulders).

All of this is nested within an intriguing framing device: Old Ted (Bob Saget) is narrating these tales to his teen children many years in the future, with the implicit promise that he’ll reveal how he met their mother. Of course, from the pilot, it becomes clear that this is going to be a roundabout and twisted story, characterized more by digression than anything else.

If it sounds like a great premise for a miniseries, or a standalone season of television, or at most a three-season show with a specific ending in mind from the beginning, well, that is not what they did! How I Met Your Mother became such a runaway success that it ran for an entire decade—almost to the point that it couldn’t justify the ages of the kids in the canned footage at the start of each episode, looking on with expectant faces agelessly and patiently as their father tells a story that takes four continuous days to tell.

The early seasons of How I Met Your Mother were quite good, sometimes insightful, and always fun. The show also loved to leverage its framing device, whether to shuffle the order of the telling, grant Old Ted the omniscience of hindsight, or give Saget an opportunity to revel in being an unreliable narrator (sometimes, when he says characters were “eating a sandwich,” the behavior he describes makes it seem like they might have been consuming some other substance). At one point, Ted gets his ass handed to him by a random goat that was at a party, only to then realize at the end of the episode that no, that happened during a different party—it renders much of the plot of the preceding episode invalid and the show blithely refuses to go back and fix it. Funnier still is when the goat returns during the actual party where it actually handed Ted his ass later in the show.

How I Met Your Mother was filled with switch-ups and in-jokes like that, but eventually the fatigue started to show. Sprinkled all throughout the cleverness were prophetic statements and near-misses that were supposed to be meaningful—in particular a yellow umbrella that keeps changing hands, at one point held by a woman who is Ted’s dedicated girlfriend for an entire season and yet isn’t the mother. After the fourth or fifth Failed Mother, all while these allusions and promises were piling up without leading to a resolution, fans began to get bored and doubtful the show would ever just end already. It became clear that any kind of resolution the showrunners had planned in the beginning was now out of their reach, buried under the sheer amount of intervening seasons.

And so, when the show advertised the ninth and final season, they gave fans the hard sell.

The Finale:  “Last Forever” Parts 1 & 2

Ted: “I’m starting to think a person gets a certain allotment of lighthouses per lifetime. And I’ve used all mine up.”

If you absolutely must finish off a show that, for the past decade, has left a question dangling over viewers’ heads, you have got to do it in a way that’s satisfying. The Prisoner and The Fugitive managed the trick in single episodes. How I Met Your Mother realized, rightly I think, that having Ted bump into The Mother in the last frame of the last episode of an entire season of TV would be the opposite of satisfying. And so, they pulled the bold move of revealing The Mother essentially right away. The entire last season of the show occurs across a single weekend—the wedding weekend of Barney and Robin, who have been on-again-off-again lovers throughout the show.

As the audience discovers almost right away, there’s a member of the wedding band who is destined to marry Ted. Cristin Milioti steps into the role as Tracy, and it certainly didn’t hurt the final season’s critical reception that she’s great.

The season unfolds with Ted serving as Barney’s best man, caught up in wedding drama as his future wife moves around just outside his orbit, developing relationships with his other friends during the events leading up to the blessed day. The season even features numerous flash-forwards to other parts of Ted and Tracy’s relationship, getting viewers used to the idea that this is where the story is going to end.

Eventually, finally, Robin and Barney are married off and Ted meets her. But right before it ends, the show does Milioti, and fans, dirty.

The Mother, it is revealed, has died. And as the kids (who were recorded doing the final scene, I will remind you, ten years before it aired!) say, the point of the tale is not how Ted met their mother. It is transparently about how he has the hots for their Aunt Robin, and how he is seeking their permission to date her. And so, one final time, Ted yanks the same blue French horn he stole from a restaurant as a sweet gesture toward Robin after their first date, offering it to her once more in the show’s final shot. (She and Barney divorced, perhaps the most realistic turn of events in the show’s denouement.)

How I Met Your Mother plays with color a lot over the course of the show: the blue French horn symbolizes the flame he carries for Robin, and is referenced numerous times throughout the show (it is, at one point, chained up to prevent his repeated thefts of it). The yellow umbrella is a persistent symbol of The Mother, carrying the promise of his destined love. At one point in the final season, they make the primary color theme complete by revealing that Ted was, as a toddler, irrationally attached to a red balloon that broke his heart when it floated away—in a surreal and touching sequence in the last season, Robin floats away from Ted in the same way.

It’s clever and meaningful. It’s just that something like six or seven of the show’s seasons are the equivalent of anime filler. I have not watched seasons 6-8 of the show, and nothing I’ve read about them, in light of having watched the final season, tells me there’s any reason for me to bother. And after all of that, the show squanders the absolutely perfect Milioti to go with a plot that clearly worked far better when the show had no expectation of running for ten damn years. The creators had already filmed the ending, in a way, so they had to go with it.

I rarely advise anybody to over-indulge in alternate endings to movies or TV shows, but in this case, the creators went ahead and served one up. Included on the official DVDs for Season 9 is a conclusion that simply ends there on the train platform in the rain, under the yellow umbrella. I vastly prefer it, because it doesn’t feel as if it’s coming out of left field. It’s an imperfect ending to an imperfect show, instead of a stubbornly prescriptive ending to a show that kept going after it invalidated that prescriptive ending.

I know a lot of people whose 20s were a wandering time, full of wild nights and photos taken with bad flash photography, just like the ones that form the title theme’s opening collage. The finale of How I Met Your Mother is about meeting The Mother, it’s about Ted getting his happy ending (two happy endings), but it is also about the bittersweet loss of leaving behind that specific time. That, at least, wasn’t a misstep.

Tune in next month, as That’s All, Folks! looks upon the works of Breaking Bad and despairs.

Kenneth Lowe CAN’T DESIGN THE MURDER HOUSE!!! You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.

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