How I Met Your Mother Review

The format is the achievement. Bays and Thomas built a sitcom around a narrator misremembering a decade, which lets them do things the multi-camera form normally cannot: correcting a flashback mid-scene, running the Slap Bet as a countdown across years, structuring a whole episode on the euphemism the narrator substitutes for what actually happened. That machinery produces jokes with delayed fuses, and the dialogue is far more inventive than the show gets credit for.

The problem is that the premise is a countdown the series refuses to run. Seasons six through eight stall in place, Ted's yearning hardens from plot into personality, and Barney's arc is completed twice and then reversed for convenience. Neil Patrick Harris and Jason Segel are consistently better than their material, while Josh Radnor draws the thankless job of being the reason we are here at all. Then the finale spends twenty minutes demolishing nine years of construction. The craft is genuine and the ending is a self-inflicted wound that the rest cannot absorb.