
The men of How I Met Your Mother are all nice, law abiding people, but they are definitely all flawed: Ted knows a lot of things about a lot of high brow subjects, but whenever he exhibits his knowledge he is an alienating, insufferable prick about it; Barney's childhood abandonment issues have led to a lifetime of overindulging on female flesh and crude, groan inducing sexual punnery; Marshall gives every human being the benefit of the doubt, even though he is a New York City resident, where it's a minor miracle that he doesn't get mugged every time he leaves the apartment.
Ted and Barney's issues are broader, and [...]

Aren't we still in the promised Autumn of Break-Ups on How I Met Your Mother? The month of broken hearts, despair, endless tears, poor dietary choices, looking out the window through the raindrops, Mumford and Sons and more poor dietary choices? Why, with one more episode to go in October did we witness "Who Wants to Be a Godparent?", an episode with a story that could have been told at any time this season? Where is my promised misery?
Instead, we had Marshall and Lily waltzing into MacLaren's, content that for the first time in five months they can hang out with their friends and away from their newborn son [...]

In the beginning, sitcoms would almost always feature self-contained 22-minute stories, with there never being a consequence to what anyone did or said that would carry over to the next episode. Johnny slipped on a banana peel. And it was good. Eventually that would change: a character began to be able lose or get a job, and pick up a new love interest and maybe someday marry them, and the tired show would be able to sprout some more material. And that was good. Then the meteoric rise of The Sopranos begat the HBO model of airing shows that didn't have episodes, but installments of an epic story, making banana peels [...]

At the beginning of the series, Barney Stinson was a character that existed to be the womanizing antonym to the nice chum main character Ted Mosby. Eventually the audience decided that Ted was sweet but boring and responded most to the badboy with the heart of something that may or may not be gold. But, the audience was smart and getting older by the episode. They wouldn't tolerate and find Mr. Stinson acting like a perpetually horny 22-year-old funny forever. Tasked with maturing the character without taking away his entertaining juvenile personality, the writing staff placed him in serious relationships, for him to ultimately mess up. In last night's [...]