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How I Met Your Mother is such a strange combination Aughts tropes. I mean its Friends but everyone pretty quickly becomes not good people like Seinfeld. It’s a sitcom but it’s also a puzzle box mystery like Lost. The lead, Josh Radnor, is an obvious Timu version of Zac Braff.
And yet it was huge at the time. Ran for nine seasons, completely reignited Neil Patrick Harris’s career, second staged Jason Segel in to not just that guy from Freaks and Geeks, but a legit movie star. Broke open Cobie Smulders in to another movie star. And yet it’s almost completely forgotten about. Until you mentioned it I think it’s more then one or two times on Lemmy, you never see gifs or memes from it. It’s like it was completely forgotten for our shared cultural landscape almost as soon as it was over. I think the only thing it was remembered for was how bad they fucked up the ending and Game of Thrones has taken that from them even.
Weirdly, though, Friends seems to hold up better.
Despite being much older, I recall walking through a room where a friend's roommates were watching Friends around 2016. I was stuck by two things:
First, that I'd noticed that a bunch of people seemed to be getting into Friends for the first time. I think it had just come to Netflix, and in addition to folks nostalgia watching, Gen z and younger millennials were discovering it. Which was why it was on.
Second, it was really watchable. I immediately paused to join them, and the jokes were landing. It had been a very long time since I'd watched a show with a laugh track, but it worked. The show was solidly entertaining.
Friends probably holds up better because the Barney character just doesn't work today. So much of his humour is just cringe. Friends' PG-quality ironically makes it more suitable since there are no characters reveling in sexual assault.
Yeah Friends is just a better show I’m sure. It definitely had a deeper bench on screen. Lisa Kudro is probably the best ‘dumb blonde’ of the last 30 years and that kind of part isn’t easy. Cortney Cox and Matthew Perry were really good comic actors and David Schwimmer is good actor if not a good comic actor. And Jenn Aniston and Matt LeBlanc sure were good looking.
Put that up against any other cast in any other sitcom and I think you’d have to go back to I Love Lucy to find a better one.
The show expertly targeted young Millennials transitioning into adulthood. But the audience grew up and matured. Watching HIMYM now is like time warping back to your first apartment after college and being a little embarrassed at the way you and your old friends used to be.
I don’t know, Friends did the same for pre-9/11 20somethings and I don’t mind watching rewatching the early seasons of that. And look how many memes there are from friends. I think there’s more to it then just the cringe factor of looking back.
My working theory is that puzzle box shows like HIMYM and Lost don’t hold up on rewatching because you get invested in the mystery (who’s the mother - what’s going on with this island) and now you know so the shows kind of lost.
I don't thing anyone watched HIMYM for learning who the mother was.