It took me a little while to figure out why people were so pissed about the finale of How I Met Your Mother, but I think I get it now, and I agree. Major spoilers ahead.
The entire nine-year run of the show, as it turns out, was misdirection. I rather like misdirection in a story up to a point, as do (I think) most people. I don’t know exactly where that point is, but it is more than safe to say that the point beyond which misdirection stops being enjoyable occurs well before the nine-year mark.
(If you are still reading, I will assume you are okay with spoilers, so here goes.)
The misdirection, of course, is that the entire show was never really about how Ted met his kids’ mother. It was about how he met and fell in love with Robin. Alan Sepinwall explains the feeling of being deceived as follows:
[T]he problem is that at a certain point the misdirection became vastly more entertaining than the illusion it was designed to facilitate, and as a result we just wind up feeling tricked, and annoyed, and wondering why we went along with all of it, when we should have known from the very first episode — from the Aunt Robin joke that got us into this gigantic mess — that this was a show that would not hesitate to make us feel tricked. And once upon a time, when we and “HIMYM” were younger, that was fun, but at a certain point, like the idea of Barney Stinson still having a Playbook in his 40s, it’s just sad.
I stopped watching somewhere in season 8, largely because the premise of the show was wearing thin. One of the last episodes I saw before watching the final two episodes was the one where Ted picks up Victoria from her own wedding so they can run away together or something equally stupid. The show had already made it pretty clear that Victoria was not the mother, so I abruptly stopped caring. (I think that the last episode I actually watched was “Splitsville,” which aired on November 12, 2012. I also didn’t start watching until season 3 or so.) One reason that the finale didn’t bother me as much as others, I think, is that I had not invested the full amount of time to watching the last season’s big build-up to Barney and Robin’s wedding.
HIMYM was, to a large extent, a victim of its own success. The creators knew where they wanted to go, but then they had to contend with the fact that the show’s popularity might keep them from getting there for a very long time. They could have introduced the mother somewhere during the show’s run, but that would have gone against the very title of the show (“And that’s how I met your mother, kids Moving on, in the spring of 2009…”)
With the mother as a recurring character, though, they could have advanced the meta-story taking place in 2030, although they were constrained by whatever footage they had of the kids that was all taken nine years ago. It might have been interesting to jump ahead in the meta-story with new footage of the kids, showing them in, say, 2035, and opening with “Kids, remember when I told you the story of how I met your mother in the spring of 2009 about five years ago? Well, I didn’t tell you everything. In the summer of 2009…”
I have to hand it to the producers for keeping the show going as long as it did, since they had to juggle their preferred (possibly required) resolution of the show with the risks of cancellation, indefinite renewal, and departure (by whatever means) of one or more central actors. In that last respect, I can think of few shows that kept the same central characters for such a long run.
TV shows with a long-term story arcs always have to find a balance between sticking to the story and adapting to real-world circumstances. The best example of that might be Babylon 5. The show’s creator, J. Michael Straczynski, had a five-year story arc planned at the very beginning of the show. They wrapped up most of the storylines by the end of season 4, however, because they thought they were going to get cancelled. Then the show got renewed for a fifth season, so they had to keep it going another year. Not only that, but one of the leads (Claudia Christian) left the show at the end of season 4. (And I’m not entirely complaining about that, because Tracy Scoggins. On an entirely-unrelated note, here’s her [NSFW] scene from Nip/Tuck dubbed in Hungarian, just ‘cuz.) The producers adapted the story to fit the realities of production, and they did it beautifully in my opinion.
Many shows end on cliffhangers because they finished production on a season before learning that they were cancelled (Farscape being perhaps the most maddening example). Other shows have long narrative arcs but pretty much admit that they are making things up as they go (cf. 24, The X-Files, and especially Lost).
When compared to other shows that try to maintain a narrative across multiple seasons, I’d say HIMYM did okay. It’s still annoying, though.
UPDATE (Pre-publication, 04/08/2014): My buddy Hershal seems to agree with me. Although he geeks much better than I do, so you should go read his blog in addition to mine.
