How I FaceTimed Your Marshall
For an episode so light on the How I Met Your Mother elements that make up the show’s identity -- lots of flashbacks, all the characters together, emotional turns that ground the broad comedy -- this...
View ArticleHow I Bet Your Mother Into Taking Off Her Top
The problem with setting an entire season of a TV comedy over a single weekend is that even if time gallops forward a few hours at a time per episode, you’re still going to have bits that drag on over...
View ArticleThat’s Me In The Corner (As A Vampire)
“Doppelgangland,” the sixteenth episode of Season 3, is essentially a sequel to “The Wish,” the one where Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) unwittingly reboots Sunnydale’s recent history by telling Anya...
View ArticleHow I Put Off Meeting Your Mother
How I Met Your Mother fans who might have been wavering about their commitment to the show after spending some eight years listening to the longest story in history broken up with increasingly unfunny...
View ArticleHow I Broke Your Aunt's Phone For No Good Reason
It's probably time to start worrying. We feared that a last HIMYM season might, rather than fixing the problems of the last few seasons, instead magnify the flaws by stretching out one premise: the...
View ArticleDid HIMYM Scramble Their Long-Runny Routine Or Is It More Over Than Easy? A...
Be careful what you wish for. My biggest complaint with HIMYM lo these last two or three seasons has been that it took funny, semi-realistic characters (at least for a multi-cam sitcom) and broadened...
View ArticleHow We Retconned Barney Meeting Your Mother
This is an episode that would not have stacked up well against early seasons of How I Met Your Mother, but placed next to this season's suffocating series of wedding weekend episodes, it feels almost...
View ArticleHow I Helped Fool Your Aunt For The Glory Of Canada
I'm a sucker for a bow-tied, sweet How I Met Your Mother episode ending, the kind that gives you butterflies as Ted's life path gets closer to The Mother's or when Lily and Marshall grow as a couple....
View ArticleHow Your Mother Beat The Devil, Who Was Very Charming, By The Way
It could very well be that I'm so tired of these characters after nine seasons that putting two strong guest stars (all right, fine, one guest star and one new series regular who's been mostly M.I.A....
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When Dudes Cry: A Hall Of Fame/Shame
One of the joys of watching television comes when you make an emotional connection with your characters. You may not have any similar life experiences to, say, those of a young punk who's as addicted...
View ArticleSlap-Hacky
In the seven years that Slap Bet has been a thing, who among us could have anticipated that the hardest slap would be saved for us, the audience, in the final season of How I Met Your Mother?...
View ArticlePenny, Luke, Jabba Talk, And Bugs With Boobs
If you had stepped out of a time machine at the start of How I Met Your Mother's Season 9 and told me that this season's slap bet episode would be a dud, and that an episode about trying to have sex...
View ArticleThe Mother Of All How I Met Your Mothers
This is what I thought (or at least secretly hoped) Season Nine would be like the whole way through. By now it's exhausting to harp on what a slow slog this weekend-as-a-season concept has been, but...
View ArticleHow I Almost Ruined Your Aunt Robin's Wedding One Last Time
We probably should have seen this coming. When it comes to Ted and Robin and Ted's pining for Robin, which is several years past its use-by date, this show will always insist on having the last word....
View ArticleHow I Fooled Your Mother Into Drinking A Fake Hangover Cure
It's become a weird kind of parlor game for me this season trying to figure out what episodes are going to be terrible based on the descriptions. It turns out I'm almost always wrong, because this one...
View ArticleHow I (Massive Spoiler)ed Your Mother
Let's not bury the lede. The big shocker at the end of tonight's episode, hinted at midway through and speculated about by fans for years, appears to be legit. If we are to believe what the show is...
View ArticleMarshall Gives His Slapping Hand A Break
Our latest diversion on the longest wedding march in TV history (seriously, longer than on most soap operas!) pretty much has just two storylines: one expected/relevant, and the other marking time....
View ArticleHow I Didn't Terrify Your Mother Into Not Kissing Me On Our First Date
On its face, this episode would appear to be another time-waster, a going-nowhere distraction when precious time is running out before the finale (which is only two weeks away). Why bring back a...
View ArticleHow I Ruined An Episode By Not Connecting The Narrative Dots Well Enough...
And there it is. There's the trainwreck-y breakage of the final season we worried might happen. After a recent string of pretty good-to-great final episodes, the high-wire act of marrying (…sorry) the...
View ArticleHow I Stuck To The Plan Regarding Your Mother, With Disastrous Results
Have you ever been so sick that you knew the only way you were ever going to feel better was to vomit and vomit and vomit until there was nothing left in you but weakness and hope? For those of us...
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