How I Met Your Mother is hands down my favorite [half hour] show. (Lost is just so damn good this season.) But before I cathartically laughed my way through wedding planning along with Lily and Marshall, and secretly loathed Barney for appropriating my inappropriate over-use of the word “Awesome” I was a loyal FRIENDS fanatic. (I’m not ashamed to say it.)
While HIMYM has often embraced it’s similarities to it’s ’90’s predecessor (opening a Season 2 episode with the gang sitting in a coffee shop for a moment before concluding “It’s defnitely cooler to hang out in a bar than a coffee shop”) I can’t help but apply the “Simpsons Did It” model to my new most beloved sitcom. (South Park once lamented it’s inability to find a storyline the Simpson’s hadn’t used in an episode by that name.) It’s the plague of the creative mind – coming up with something completely original is challenging after all of these years of movies and television (and books and plays…blah blah blah) but HIMYM resembles Friends in more ways than one.
Lily and Marshall could easily swap their DOWSETREPLA digs for Chandler and Monica’s West Village apartment, with their over meddlesome but well intentioned wife meets comic-relief/loving husband in sell-out job dynamic.
Ted’s your weepy, wimpy, lookin’ for love Ross, with a fancy job and a penchant for having mini-breakdowns. Of course he’s got his on-again, off-again love interest in witty/sexy career girl Robin, who like Rachel has fabulous hair and was the latest edition to the group, joining up as the Fish-Out-of-Water in the Pilot episode. Although I guess the name of the show would dictate that they won’t be riding off into the sunset together come the series finale. (Of course Robin’s Canadian, which is way more hilarious than being from Long Island, but I digress.)
Barney’s got Joey’s “ladies love me” angle cornered, and although we get to spend a fair bit of time with him at his Goliath National Bank job, like Chandler, none of his friends know exactly what he does for a living.
Thankfully the useless and annoying Phoebe character has been relegated to guest roles and any one of Ted’s interchangeable love interests, where she will hopefully stay.
And this week, plucking a play from the Bright/Kauffman/Crane handbook, the gang from HIMYM engaged in a round of “They don’t know we know they know” practical jokery, strikingly similar to the friend’s episode “The One Where Everyone Finds Out.”
But where Friends was a show I watched in High School, fantasizing about the days when I too would have my own Monkey and live in NYC, HIMYM is the show that woke me up to realize that I was standing squarely in a new demographic, laughing with new fervor and understanding at jokes about going bridal, post-collegiate torments, refusal to act like an adult, and career suicide. Looks like I’m 18-24 no more.
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