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How I Met Your Mother
2005 · TV series · 9 seasons
Created by Craig Thomas, Carter Bays
A father recounts to his children - through a series of flashbacks - the journey he and his four best friends took leading up to him meeting their mother.
7 positive9 negative1 mixed37 neutralfrom 54 commenters
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58 comments on Hacker News
> But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience.
It's never been the phone for me, particularly. I just don't pick mine up very often.
To have much more time to learn things I had to learn one key skill: systematically lose interest in syndicated American television. Other people can watch Lost, Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother etc.; I will use my time elsewhere.
(OK so I picked three there that are apparently widely recognised as having a major letdown as an ending, but you see my point I guess.)
Once I stopped sharing an interest in watching every episode of some show that a friend or the general zeitgeist was obsessed with, that is hundreds of hours (per show!) for a hobby.
And these days it's hobby-enabling money, because in many cases these shows are the only reason to pick up an extra streaming subscription. You can buy a good 3D printer and some filament, or an electric guitar and a little amp or headphone effects unit for less than a year's premium plan for an American streaming service, and a fully playable guitar alone costs about as much as a year's standard Netflix.
I learned this long enough ago that I have gone without a television for decades now. I had to re-learn it in the era of streaming TV. If you think you want to see one of these shows, they will be around forever so you can watch them from a hospital bed one day.
> Dating websites were the less exhausting alternative to going out drinking or finding new social circles
The per-event odds of finding love by going out drinking and joining new social circles are low. But the odds of making some great memories and good friends in the process are pretty high*. At least better compared to the alternative of sitting at home and swiping on an app.
* There's an entire TV show based on this premise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother
Also, even some "pantsers" can get away with seeming to have had a plan all along if they write the project out of order from how the reader will read it/viewer will watch it. You can write the end first, no one can stop you (except maybe your editor because editing back together into the "right" order can be a chore).
(A bit harder to build a TV show that way, though not impossible; How I Met Your Mother almost pulled it off, depending on who you ask, for one instance.)
> All the references to the original movies are on point
How I Met Your Mother was a very popular show.
But when I watched it, I was struck by the fact that in many, many places where an ordinary sitcom would have a joke, HIMYM instead had a continuity reference. Everything about the structure of the scene would suggest that the reference had been a comical beat, and the laugh track would play, but there was not even the faintest suggestion of... a joke.
If I want to hear about things that happened in the original movies, I can watch them. Does referring to them improve Andor somehow?
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
Likewise, “IT Crowd” is great.
But the point about BBT is that it isn’t really a show about nerds or physics; it’s about emotional intelligence. This was a fairly groundbreaking angle for a Hollywood sitcom at the time when comparable mainstream shows were built on rather mean-spirited writing and stunted character development, like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Two and a Half Men.”
And they're going from binge-watching ad-free episode of an entire series, to releasing one episode a week... with adverts.
Yeah, no thanks. I'll just VPN+torrent the ad-free version and watch that, thanks. On any device of my choosing as well.
And why should I pay £8.99 or whatever to one streaming service, for one programme, that was previously "free to air" for the other series? Paramount taking back Star Trek from Netflix for example.
I'm not sure how many multi-million dollar, unseen cancelled-after-one-season dramas with 50,000 viewers these studios need to create before they realise 'we need viewers to 'build a franchise' and make a profit'.
Just imagine if these series or dramas were only seen by a few thousand people at most: Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Band of Brothers, Shogun, Dallas, Cheers and so on. Even How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory were pretty much pre-streaming when they started, but syndicated to world-wide terrestrial channels.
Hi!
I would love to try this. I am currently on my 7th language so I am always excited to find language learning apps. So far none of them has beaten a good old language course and consuming media in the language.
Maybe the website has received a bit too much love but I am trying to search for a TV show and the UI is not reacting at all (I entered "How I Met Your Mother" in the textbox below "How to do what you love" on the playground page).
A bit of a strange question I have is who created the pictures for your updates page? The style reminds me of Raycast marketing material which I find incredibly beautiful. I really like the optics, is there a name for this style?
All the best!
> That’s probably due to the character over plot idea, as there usually isn’t a storyline I’m dying to finish.
Yes, but how you handle your characters can still be very important. There are shows where the ending is simply a good episode, sending some loved characters off - like The Big Bang Theory. The ending itself is not that great of an episode on the tin, but the viewer has come to love these characters and having a great ending for them is important.
And then there are endings like How I Met Your Mother, which manage to cast the the whole series in a worse light. It would be the counter-example for ruining a comedy with the finale.
Overall, comedy endings are probably simpler than most, but you can still make a lot wrong.
I feel the same way about Game of Thrones. I really loved the first few seasons, but I can't bring myself to start rewatching them as I know where it inevitably goes.
It's even worse than How I Met Your Mother in my opinion, for two reasons - first , GoT is much more focused on a long running story, making the conclusion more important. But more importantly, HIMYM is a sharp decline; you can simply skip the last two episodes and have a perfectly fine ending. GOT just declines ever more, making it hard to set a point at which to end the show.
I just noticed that complete series of shows can be fairly cheap. I was in Best Buy and happened to walk by the DVD section for example and saw the complete "How I Met Your Mother" in a 28 disc boxed set for $32.99.
Unfortunately the world of DVD and Blu-ray seems to be overrun with too many editions. For example besides that particular HIMYM set (here it is at Amazon [1]), there is also this one [2] which is $49.99.
The pictures for the two look identical. But the release date listed for the $32.99 is about 9 months later, and the media format descriptions differ between the two. The $32.99 one says Subtitled, NTSC. The $49.99 one says NTSC, Widescreen, Box set, Subtitles, AC-3, Dolby. The $32.99 lists language as "English (Dolby Surround)" so does apparently have Dolby. The $49.99 one doesn't list language. The $32.99 one says it has English, French, and Spanish subtitles. The $49.99 just says French and Spanish subtitles. Does one of them have better sound? Do either of them have commentary, deleted scenes, or other special features. Does only the $49.99 have widescreen?
Some comments mention that there is commentary, but (1) Amazon considers these two sets to be variations on the same set and so they share comments, so there is no way to tell which set the comment is talking about, and (2) some of those comments are from several years before either set was released--they were definitely commenting about HIMYM so my guess is that they were for early releases of specific seasons or something like that.
If I were interested in buying that complete HIMYM I'd have no idea from those Amazon listings and comments which set to buy.
I've also seen similar things when considering buying movies. There will often be one or more of a DVD, a DVD + digital code, a Blu-ray + DVD + digital code, a 4K UHD Blu-ray, a 4K UHD Blu-ray + digital code, a 4K UHD Blu-ray + DVD + digital code, and probably some that I've forgotten.
Online listings often don't say if the digital code is for 4K, and often don't say much about special features. It is confusing enough that my impulse to buy the movie does not last long enough for me to figure out which to buy.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Met-Your-Mother-Complete/dp/B07GJJ1R6R/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/How-Met-Your-Mother-Complete/dp/B0747GRCDR/
Big Bang Theory is one of those scapegoat shows that smart people have a stock "it sucks" opinion about. It's a very good light sitcom as far as light sitcoms go and easily holds its own with shows like How I Met Your Mother.
I feel you both may be in a bubble; as far as I can tell, the two evergreen sitcoms general audience keeps rewatching are Friends and How I Met Your Mother. Those two shows just refuse to die.
Sometimes I put on a TV show I’ve already seen playing in the background to help me focus. Something easy like Scrubs or How I Met Your Mother, where you really don’t need effort to keep track. It can play in the background for the whole day and it somehow helps me get in the zone, but not always.
"I Love Lucy" (first few seasons), "Frasier", "Seinfeld", "Friends", "How I Met Your Mother" are some of many TV shows taking place in middle-income apartments.
"The Jeffersons" live in a "Deluxe Apartment in the Sky".
Diff'rent Strokes took place in the apartment home of a multi-millionaire.
In "Green Acres" they leave a "penthouse view" apartment to live in a run-down house.
I stopped reading at the 3rd paragraph. Not that the article was bad. But that it took me to a difficult place[1], where I had to consider the "what if" scenarios that I dreaded.
It sounds like this happened around the same time as our experience. What I recall of my experience, I went into sort of a relentlessly optimistic support guy. Suppressing everything I was thinking and worrying about, so as to take care of my family.
Our outcome was different. My wife of 31+ years is sitting a mere 1 meter from me on our couch, watching a TV show with our 22 year old daughter (12 at the time of the event). She is officially a survivor.
I've commented to my therapist that there really doesn't seem to be much support for families/spouses for survivors. This was a tremendously traumatic experience, that I only started addressing last year. Vocalizing your fears is hard, after you've buried them for so long to support your family.
I'm sure this is a good article. I just can't read beyond where I went. Likewise, the last episode of "How I met your mother" hit me very hard (1 scene, barely 30 seconds). I've never been able to complete that.
Its not that I can't watch/read these things, its that it resonates uncomfortably with my own experiences, and I don't wish to experience that discomfort if at all possible.
[1] https://blog.scalability.org/2011/11/ot-it-really-focuses-your-attention-on-the-important-things/
how i met your mother, hands down the best tv show ever,,,,,,, did this before location tracking was a thing...... "the best burger in NY", a classic
>The first thing was the marriage of Barney and Robin, which was built up over the last one to two seasons and then undone within 15 minutes (and without good reason!).
First half of S5 and all of S8 and S9 depict in detail why Robin and Barney are horrible together.
>The worst thing, however, was bringing the mother in and then killing her off with basically no screen time. I mean, the whole series was about meeting her!
Nope. The kids themselves tell their father otherwise. Ted tells the story of "how I met your mother" to his kids to justify to himself why he should move on with his life and again pursue a relationship with Robin; his kids tell him that they have no problem with this, and are happy that he is interested in "Aunt Robin", who has already been a substitute mother figure for them (see "Little Boys").
>And what really killed the series for me were the last 15 minutes. I was pretty sad seeing everything that was built up over 9 seasons killed within not even two episodes and then it ends with "just kidding, the whole point of this story was just to date Robin after all".
Rewatch the show. Not just "Little Boys"; every single episode, from the first one onward (which I saw the day it aired, in September 2005), contains clues that lead the patient and observant viewer toward the ending.
Apparently 19 year-old Redditors are not the only ones who believe in TV-style 'shipping "true love", which means that the girl the guy fate says is meant for him in S1E01—in this case, the Mother—must be still The One in S9E22; any variance must be punished. They haven't yet learned that in the real world heartbreak and heartache and sad things do happen, and sometimes it's possible for two lonely old friends to find love again later in life.
To put another way: Most people are lucky to meet the love of their life.
Ted is luckier. He meets two loves of his life.
And you'll be happier if you keep it that way :-) The only worse ending I know is that of How I Met Your Mother. Just skip the last two episodes there, seriously.
> The parent commenter said "Take something like the bar in [the television show] How I Met Your Mother. Obviously this is all fictional and these characters spend a lot of time there". The only reason they can meet there and hear each other is because the bar is silent and they're actually on a sound stage. Watch any show where any characters interact at a bar: they talk comfortably in a way that would not work in real life.
The bar in the show is (very) loosely based on a real-world location: McGee's Pub in midtown Manhattan. While I haven't visited in quite a few years, when I did visit, the pub was typically quiet enough to have a conversation at your table without raising your voice.
I want to raise another contributor: volume. At most bars in large cities, if I'm in a group of six people, I can not hear someone talking who isn't sitting directly next to me.
The parent commenter said "Take something like the bar in [the television show] How I Met Your Mother. Obviously this is all fictional and these characters spend a lot of time there". The only reason they can meet there and hear each other is because the bar is silent and they're actually on a sound stage. Watch any show where any characters interact at a bar: they talk comfortably in a way that would not work in real life.
Bars and restaurants have simply gotten measurably louder to the point where people are choosing to meet at home instead. When English Pubs and U.S. speakeasies became popular, amplified music was not a thing. Even the name "speakeasy" comes from the fact that people could and did speak quietly in the bars!
> But consider a 1993 study of about a dozen dining establishments, which found that sound levels peaked at 68 decibels (a little louder than normal chitchat). Compare that with a much larger 2018 survey of New York City restaurants, in which one-quarter hit at least 81 decibels (more like a garbage disposal), the average level was 77, and just 10 percent were 70 decibels or below. The report deemed those “quiet.”
https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/restaurant-noise-levels-solutions/
Scientific papers abound
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=86590
> There are increasing numbers of reports from patrons complaining about the difficulty in conversing with fellow diners due to loud venues. In Zagat’s 2016 Annual Survey, when surveyors were asked what irritated them the most about dining out, noise was the second highest complaint (25%) behind poor service (28%). But in major urban cities of San Francisco, Boston, Portland and New York City, noise was the number one complaint [34]
> How I Met Your Mother 9 seasons
Luckily the last season only has 22 episodes!
A lot of series jump the shark of they get dragged out for long. Even worse, if it's a slow decline, it kills rewatchability. Some manage, but it goes wrong more often than not. And especially if your concept does not lend itself to a lot of seasons (like Chernobyl, for example), you should stop while it's still good.
Almost all the shows i watch over and over and again are ones with 7+ seasons,
90's star trek (tng ds9 voy) all 7 seasons, MAS*H 12 seasons, Frasier 11 season, Scrubs 8 season (I skip season 9 and refuse to acknowledge its existance), Red Dwarf 8 season (+ more after the revival decades later), X-Files 11 seasons, How I Met Your Mother 9 seasons, Freinds 10 seasons, Stargate SG1 10 seasons, three seasons is to little to grow a fallowing and not enough for you to rewatch
People often say they will keep old TV shows like Friends, How I Met Your Mother or The Office on in the background. I think it simulates the feeling of having familiar social connections in ones life.
In Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist's wife Mildred "finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls" [1]. She frequently calls the entertainers that appear on the screen her family. So this satirical observation is at least as old as that fiction.
I frequently wonder how AR/VR will play in this particular space. Cynically, I believe there is a killer app to be had there.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
Oh shit. RIP. I've just been rewatching How I Met Your Mother and I can never forget Bob's voice as older Ted. I was disappointed they didn't use him for the final episode.
Full House was life as a child. RIP Danny Tanner.
I remember the scene in the TV show "How I met your mother" where one of the main characters, Marshall, goes to visit his dad's grave with a BBQ and some beers to watch a game(of football?) with his dad like they always used to. I thought it was extremely unusual but actually, kind of lovely.
Where I come from(Poland) cemetaries are almost sacred, instead of halloween we celebrate "wszystkich świętych"(all saints day) where everyone does the annual pilgrimage to the graves of their families to pay their respects. At the end of the night every cemetery is glowing with candles, all graves are adorned with flowers and other decorations it's all very solemn and sirious - I think the idea of a "picnic" at a cemetery would be seen as very disrespectful here - but it's still very interesting.
I definitely saw this in How I Met Your Mother in Netflix, where a movie poster on a cinema wall was (badly) replaced by a newer movie that came out after the show aired. I wouldn't have minded if it was done better, as that specific example was quite noticable, but it is perfectly possible there was a few more of those that I didn't notice.
Pretty much every sitcom today glorifies casual sex and avoidance of committed relationships. “How I Met Your Mother” for example.
Yeah, I would argue "long term relationship" is a sign of commitment.
I'm more talking about shows and movies that make it seem like non-committal hookups and switching sexual partners rapidly for any reason is cool and totally normal:
- How I Met Your Mother (Barney)
- The Office (everyone has slept with everyone by the end)
- Game of Thrones
You could argue the "good" characters like Tyrion typically showed more commitment in their sexual activities than "bad" characters like Theon who just knocked up random women for fun. But even then you have instances where the "heroes" like Arya have one night stands with no consequences (because HBO wanted to be edgy).
- Friends
Two thoughts:
1) I think the view that “90% of people are crap” is incredibly misanthropic, cynical, and a view that would likely make the world a worse place if widely adopted.
2) I think enjoying the 90% of crap is maybe more important than enjoying the 10% of not crap.
Being able to enjoy bad movies, bad music, bad art, bad everything is great. Who wouldn’t want to increase the amount of things they could enjoy by 2x or 3x or 9x? I watched Battlefield Earth recently and it was a blast! One of my favorite shows is How I Met Your Mother (which is "crap" if you define "crap" as "less than the 90th percentile in that medium"...it's prolly a 70 or 80th percentile show).
Why be an elite who turns their nose up at things when you can enjoy both the things the elites like AND the things they sneer at? Sign me up for the trash!
Vox did a video on this several years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D420SOmL6U
I recently did a rewatch of older Simpsons episodes lately and aside from the 90s references a lot of the economic conditions seems incredibly outdated. Much like watching Friends or even more "recent" shows like How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) where the characters undergo their lives in a big expensive city but not work constantly.
It's hard to suspend belief on those shows given the shenanigans they do. How on earth did they live in that apartment (Friends/HIMYM), or live in such a large single family home on one income? The shows end up having to address their own disbelief with rent control (Friends) or the Frank Grimes episode (The Simpsons).
Shows and networks have already been doing this for a very long time.
https://www.hypable.com/how-i-met-your-mother-is-inserting-new-ads-into-old-episodes/
I haven't watched many recent sitcoms, I think the last one I wanted regularly was How I Met Your Mother which had zero gay lead characters (even though the biggest womanizer on the show was played by and actor who is gay in real life).
There are some gay focused shows (Grace & Frankie, Will and Grace), but looking at the top 5 current sitcoms [1]
1. Big Bang Theory - none of the main characters are gay
2. Modern Family - out of 11 main characters, 2 are gay
3. Brooklyn Nine Nine - out of 10 main characters, 1 is gay
4. The Simpsons - I don't know how to count main characters, but I don't think any are gay
5. Always Sunny in Philadelphia - Out of 5 main characters, one is (or might be?) gay.
(I used Wikipedia for most of these, so I may not have gotten the counts completely accurate)
This doesn't seem to be a gross over representation of homosexuality - I wonder if you're suffering from observation bias, or if maybe you're just watching sitcoms that have more gay characters for whatever reason.
[1] - https://www.ranker.com/list/best-current-tv-sitcoms/ranker-tv
TBBT is not a "parody". It is your standard-issue broadcast network sitcom about 3 males, 3 females and their friendships as they date and break up with each other, marry each other and have kids. This is a successful premise that has stood for decades in American TV. Friends and How I Met Your Mother followed the same principles almost to a tee. That's how you get a show that runs for 10 seasons in this day and age.
Pointing out that TBBT's parody is poor is like saying Will & Grace did not portray a representative picture of gay urbanites.
> As I pointed out in a sibling comment, I think Netflix actually has the same problem. There is a significant presence of long-running shows that people love to watch on Netflix: Friends, Breaking Bad, Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother, etc..
Is that really true though? As video content gets older it usually gets watched less, becomes cheaper and gets re-aired everywhere it can. Once you watch it many don't re-watch. I'd love to know if there were statistics on this either way!
Music, on the other hand, doesn't show its age nearly as much and old music is constantly replayed even in the latest TV shows and movies. Seems to be music is almost timeless whereas video is not. But, again, I'd love to see some data around these topics to valid (or invalid) what I think to be true.
In 22 years of living in germany, ive never once heard anyone use that atrocity of a word or anything close to it - I guess it's a joke-word from the tv series How I met your mother making fun of the fact that many complex german words are just glued together from other words, eg. Krankenhaus ("ill building" or "building for the ill"). This does not mean that every compound word you theoretically could form is actually a valid german word.
Modern Family, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, The Middle, Raising Hope, How I Met Your Mother, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt were all fairly recent examples of decent modern sitcoms (and wow that list is bigger than I thought it'd be), and for the most part, generally centered around middle class families/people. Some are a bit more outlandish and over-the-top at times, but that can also be their appeal.
By modern, I also mean they follow a continuing story arc episode-to-episode, so while you could watch any episode in isolation, you get a lot more if you know backstory and the characters. They're also all "single camera" shows (no laugh track) which IMHO is a much better style, and allows them to be more creative, have a continuing story, and frankly, be funnier than the (pause for laughter) lines in a show like Big Bang Theory.
An obvious counterexample is the sitcom "How I Met Your Mother", which featured an environmental lawyer, an architect (turned college professor in later seasons), a teacher, and a news reporter.
Should have known an article titled with "Almost Everyone" would be completely devoid of any data to back up an assertion based upon a preconceived notion of why Humans are single.
I'm sorry but life is not an episode of "How I Met Your Mother" where all of the single people are waiting to find the "one". I'll speak anecdotally for those I know who are single simply because we choose to be. For us our work and self is too important and time consuming at this junction of our lives to devote the time and energy it takes to make a relationship work.
Here's at least the press release with a little more details:
https://pr.netflix.com/WebClient/getNewsSummary.do?newsId=2603
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DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU WERE HOOKED? NETFLIX DOES Netflix Unveils When Fandom Begins For Some of Todays Most Popular Series Sep 23, 2015 Los Gatos, Calif., September 23, 2015 -- It may have taken Walter White nearly an entire season to become Heisenberg and Frank Underwood 13 episodes to become VP (spoiler alert!), but it turns out fans committed to these series long before those plot twists unfolded. Hint: it wasnt in the pilot episode.
Netflix analyzed its global streaming data* across the inaugural seasons of some of todays most popular shows - both Netflix original series and shows that premiered on other networks - looking for signals that pointed to when viewers became hooked. It turns out that when commercial breaks and appointment viewing are stripped away and consumers can watch an entire season as they choose, you can see fandom emerge. That is, 70% of viewers who watched the hooked episode went on to complete season one or more poetically, when members were hooked and there was no turning back.
“Given the precious nature of primetime slots on traditional TV, a series pilot is arguably the most important point in the life of the show,” said Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer for Netflix. “However, in our research of more than 20 shows across 16 markets, we found that no one was ever hooked on the pilot. This gives us confidence that giving our members all episodes at once is more aligned with how fans are made.”
While the data identified the hooked episode, it was shy on pinpointing exact moments, but we have a few ideas of our own to help jog your memory... For starters, in Breaking Bad it may have taken the flip of a coin to decide whether Jesse or Walt would put the finishing blow on Krazy 8, but when the decrepit heap of a former drug dealer rains down from Jesse’s ceiling, theres no denying viewers would stay to see how the season cleaned up (episode 2). Speaking of messes, Crazy Eyes drops both poems and fluids in her roller coaster romance with Piper in Orange is the New Black, but it was likely the throw of a pie to defend her (then) bae’s honor that had members asking for seconds (episode 3). For Dexter another episode equals another body, this time courtesy of the “Ice Truck Killer,” but our money’s on Dexter’s trip down memory lane reliving his inaugural kill that was the real tipping point - after all, fans never forget the first time (episode 3).
“There’s a unique sense of intimacy with creating a show for Netflix. Knowing you have an audience's undivided attention and that in essence, they are letting these characters in their home, we unfolded storylines at a more natural pace,” said Marta Kauffman. “In episode four, we see Grace and Frankie having no choice but to confront their fear, anger and uncertainty head on, which to me as a creator was a nice turning point to shift the narrative to focus on the future instead of the past; it is nice to know viewers were there right along with us.”
While around the world the hooked episode was relatively consistent, slight geographic differences did present themselves. The Dutch, for instance, tend to fall in love with series the fastest, getting hooked one episode ahead of most countries irrespective of the show. Germans showed early fandom for Arrow whereas France fell first for How I Met Your Mother. In Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill won Brazilians over one episode quicker than Mexicans. And Down Under, viewers prove to hold out longer across the board, with members in Australia and New Zealand getting hooked one to two episodes later than the rest of the world on almost every show. Despite these differences, the hooked moment had no correlation to audience size or attrition, regardless of show, episode number or country.
Methodology: The data in this research was pulled from accounts who started watching season one of the selected series between January 2015 - July 2015 in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK and US and between April 2015 - July 2015 for Australia and New Zealand. A hooked episode was defined when 70% of viewers who watched that episode went on to complete season one. Hooked episodes were first identified by country, then averaged to create the global hooked episode. The hooked episode had no correlation to total viewership numbers or attrition.
Denotes shows where for one or more countries, the show was unavailable to watch on Netflix and therefore the average is comprised of data from less than 16 countries
*The Netflix research didnt indicate exact plot points, but it did confirm episodes.
> How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory
HIMYM was innovative in another way, too. The first person narrator is somewhat unreliable, leading to the same story being revisited multiple times. Sometimes this was all in the same episode, being revisited from each character's perspective. Other stories are told and retold through the entire run of the series, up to and including the very end of the show.
I think there are two separate viewpoints, both useful, neither true, that can be used to understand the structuring of stories. The viewpoint espoused in this article is that there exist certain timeless structures, imposed by the form that inextricably results in a type of output. And that the job of a writer is to discover these forms and work within them.
There's another line of argument, made by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You, where viewers are trained by the media to read texts in a more sophisticated fashion. As viewers become more media savvy, the desire for surprise causes a constant creative arms race as structures that were once avant garde becomes commonplace, then tired, then old fashioned.
The A/B plot mentioned in the article is only about 40 years old (starting with Hill St Blues in 1981). Prior to that, television comedy followed a strict single line for fear of confusing the audience. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see a sitcom go up to E plots. What's allowed them to do that is that television has developed increasingly dense visual shorthand that allows them to speed through a plot even faster, allowing for more story to fit into those 22 minutes.
Previous constraints on syndication meant that characters were required to remain in a stasis throughout the entire run but season long and series long arcs are now becoming the norm with even relatively retrograde sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory engaging in long term plotting.
If you look towards the cutting edge, you start to see people playing around with the traditional three act structure in interesting ways to keep the form fresh. How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory, sometimes establishing the conclusion at the front of the episode and then uses flashbacks to flesh out the central conflict in reverse. Louie routinely fits 2 or 3 stories into a single episode or stretches a single story across multiple episodes. Arrested Development S4 was an overly ambitious attempt to build a single, series long story, told and retold from multiple perspectives. And one of Girls' most polarizing episodes, One Man's Treasure (the bottle episode where Hannah has a tryst with the rich doctor) was hated by some precisely because it rejected the standard formula and resolutely avoided going for a climax and resolution.
Such techniques follow the standard adoption cycle, first appearing in cutting edge, low rated comedies aimed at early adopters before eventually gaining widespread appeal and mainstream success before becoming hacky and relegated to shows for children and old people.
I have to say, there's only a problem while illegally downloading stuff (tv shows, films, ...) of course. BitTorrent itself is perfectly legal, and I've seriously used it many times to download Linux ISOs and similar. Also technically, it is the uploading that bittorrent does that is illegal.
The other day I made the mistake of downloading one of the last How I Met Your Mother episodes via torrent (the first time in years). Two weeks later I had a nice invoice over several hundred Euros in my mailbox :-(, and I know a couple other people to whom happened the same. That's why I wouldn't touch Popcorn Time with a ten feet pole.
The broadcasters aren't monopolies, not in an age where the broadcast medium itself (as distinct from the content) is increasingly irrelevant. Only 7% of households rely on over-the-air TV: https://www.ce.org/News/News-Releases/Press-Releases/2013-Press-Releases/Only-Seven-Percent-of-TV-Households-Rely-on-Over-t.aspx.
The networks continue to matter because they offer products that people want to buy (movies and TV shows). These products are so compelling, that very few people have managed to offer compelling alternatives. E.g. people don't just want a doctor show, they want "House." They don't just want a sitcom, they want "How I Met Your Mother." It's not "innovation" to simply figure out new ways to take popular products and distribute them to consumers without paying the creators.
I applaud Netflix and Amazon for going down the path of real competition. Shows like "House of Cards" and "Alpha House" are rare alternatives to the media offered by established companies that actually receive good critical and audience reception.
The setup for the article theorizes on the cost of lying on the person's stress levels. I'm sure that's a factor, but I think that pales in comparison to the empirical evidence the author has found in her own life -- the benefit of transparency.
There's an episode of How I Met Your Mother where a character always asks "Where's the poop?"[1] when she can tell someone is lying. She had a dog that always made he same face when it was hiding that it had pooped in the house.
I think the truth is that we all know in business there is always some poop somewhere. Whenever we lie, we leave our audience with an uneasy feeling, wondering what the catch is.
When we come right out and tell them what the catch is, we get past that barrier, which builds a relationship of trust from the start and allows the audience to weigh the values of our proposal on its true merits. This is the real power of telling the truth.
[1]: http://how-i-met-your-mother.wikia.com/wiki/Where's_the_poop%3F
"66. Germans seem to really enjoy watching (dubbed) How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory."
haha, that's true. These TV series run in an infinite loop. And of course everything in TV is dubbed ;)
The IT Crowd has 24 episodes, BBT has 134 and is still running. IMO that makes them kinda hard to compare.
And weren't the earlier episodes of BBT a bit different? I seem to remember they had more "hard" science/tech jokes that actually made sense (jokes that seemed like they would be quite obscure without an exact/tech background).
So, what if BBT had squeezed their ideas into a smaller amount of episodes?
Of course one could say that it was exactly that choice, that makes the one better than the other. And I'd have to give you a sort of kind of "yes, maybe". Because I don't know, sometimes the UK format series are a little bit too short (indeed, like The IT Crowd!!), but some US format series go on for way too long[0]. I would hope there is some optimal middle road.
(but then maybe not, the first example that came to mind of mixing US/UK serial styles was Torchwood: Miracle Day, the worst of the series, IMHO. There may be better examples I'm not thinking of right now, though)
[0] How I Met Your Mother being a prime example. If only they would push it a little bit further, and then some more still, so it would turn back upon itself in a somewhat post-modern sense, by actually making the viewers just as bored as the "Kids, ..." at the beginning of each episode, their inner voices silently screaming at Ted to get to the bloody point and finish up the story already. This would of course kill the ratings, but they could sell the show to Belgium, the Netherlands and other countries where anti-humour is still appreciated :-P There is time ...
One source of these "paper cuts" is that we live immersed in a highly sexual culture. "Booth babes" are provided for men to oggle at tech conferences, but the idealized female body is also used to sell beer, cars, and hamburgers to us on TV. Cleavage shots are common on highway billboards. "Dongle" jokes are on Family Guy, the Daily Show, HBO, CBS, NBC, and even PG movies (I remember a penis joke in "Shrek"). When guys make sexual comments, they are simply participating in the culture that they live in.
While tech has some attitudes that are undeniably sexist, comments that would happen in any industry are perceived as more threatening because the gender ratio is so out of whack. If females felt safer in tech, then they wouldn't notice as much the background noise of cultural hyper-sexuality.
It feels unfair or unreasonable to many men to check their American culture at the door in order to make females feel comfortable in tech, which is the source of the recent shitshow over PyCon. Most men are willing to fight blatantly sexist shit - the groping and nasty comments reported from tech conferences over the last few years. I am 100% on PyCon's side with the code of conduct and support resources for women.
But males in tech simply don't know how to have a conversation without "that's what she said". That's what they hear at night on "How I met your mother".
We have a sexually libertine culture. That is viewed as "progress" by some, including many feminists, but it is not without costs. And there is no easy way to silence it.
Not movies. But definitely something that does not need your full attention - something that you don't mind tuning in and out of. This would mostly be TV shows - Simpsons, Family Guy, Two and a half men, How I met your mother. Seinfeld was great for this.
The question is, how much is your time worth? I'd rather take the time I save by not ripping all my media and spend it doing useful stuff. Someday I may discover I can no longer watch old episodes of How I Met Your Mother -- and it will incense me, but I think I'll get over it.
I think the character Barney of the highly successful US TV show "How I Met Your Mother" is a pick-up artist.
I watch full episodes of How I Met Your Mother for free on cbs.com. No need for Pirate Bay. Unless, of course, you're talking about web-exclusive shows.
sigh I did... :( Now, thanks to the over-the-top "nobody's going to think that" comment, we get to have an argument over whether I'm stupid instead of looking at similar situations (such as the many people who do that to my brand, and the real confusion I can demonstrate among both my user base and the people I network with, many of whom are not so technical as you, I, or even my users), the problems with accepting that specific excuse at face value (as I have found it equally used by people running real money-related scams in addition to people with good intentions), the potential for damage to the brand for the people we admire who built it (Kernighan is still alive, and it seems pretty evident that he is paying homage to this with the cover of his new book, D is for Digital), or any of the interesting moral questions behind the sentiment (for a humorous example of where this can go, see the episode "I'm Not That Guy" of How I Met Your Mother).
Exercise is key! It refreshes mind and body. Unlike watching 132 episodes of How I Met Your Mother.
There is also a good sitcom skit. See "how I met your mother". Man, I don't know what episode. I think the one where he breaks up with robin, grows a breakup beard and says, "You're suited up, I'm bearded down..." see all the styles they got out of just one shaving session! :)
We got rid of our cable about ten years ago and never regretted it - not even our kids, who seem to recognize that most of it's crap anyway. With some of the savings from not having to pay a monthly cable bill, we occasionally spring for DVDs of the few TV shows we actually enjoy.
It may be just my own selection bias, but it seems to me that the best TV shows are getting progressively better - by which I mean more connected rather than episodic, as well as smart and content-dense enough to hold up under repeat viewings. This may be a response to the increase in the ratio of home library : broadcast viewings.
On the other hand, I've also noticed that embedded advertising seems to be getting more common. In an episode of How I Met Your Mother, the credits identify Cadillac as a sponsor after one character calls another "the Cadillac of rebound guys".
Was Microsoft ever such a big brand?
Google is, Apple is, Dell is, but with Microsoft it is more like many Brands: Windows, XBox, Zune.. I think the main things that people immediately associate with the actual word "Microsoft" might be mice and keyboards.
But, (at least in my perception) they are slowly beginning to address the problem of decreasing user numbers. See their marketing at "Colbert Report" and, recently, the How I Met Your Mother episode "Subway Wars", that was full of Bing and Windows product placement. Again, not promoting the Brand "Microsoft" directly, but rather its products. The shiny logo stands for Windows, while in Apple's case the logo refers to a whole company.
I didn't see it before-hand, but I suspect that it was inspired by a recent episode of "How I Met Your Mother", in which they were debating the qualifications necessary for being a New Yorker.
Because of that episode, I immediately recognized the purpose and intent of the website, though I'm certain it was far less obvious to those who didn't see it.
Of interest, the criteria they came up with were:
You're not a New Yorker until: - You've stolen a cab from someone who needed it more than you, - You've killed a cockroach with your bare hands - Seen Woody Allen and, - Cried on the subway, oblivious to what anyone else thinks