Typical TV sitcoms tend to suck. The ultra-telegraphed jokes. The canned studio audience laughter. No one talks like that. No one acts that way. There’s a real air of phoniness to the whole thing.
With the news that Hilary Duff is set to star in How I Met Your Father, though, it has me thinking about How I Met Your Mother and how it stood apart. The way it sort of reminded you of your group of friends. The amazingly inappropriate jokes it got away with — the kind you’ll say you never make yourself, but let’s be honest, you do.
How I Met Your Mother was one of my favorite shows because it felt real. There were wins and losses. There was love and heartbreak. Most of all, there was perseverance. Ted Mosby got knocked down, but Ted Mosby kept on getting back up. He believed he’d find true love, and finally, finally, he did.
In that colossally bad finale.
One of the lessons I hope How I Met Your Father takes into consideration is that everyone hopes for the happy ending, regardless of our prior struggles. We hope for it. You, sitting here reading this right now? You want everything to work out for you. I want the same for myself. It’s something we all desire. It is human.
If we could all guarantee ourselves the happy ending, we would do that. Who would care about spoilers? The what at the end is never as important as the how you got there. It’s the whole “journey matters more than the destination” thing. It’s that Miley Cyrus song. “It’s the cliiiiiiiiimb.”
In How I Met Your Mother, we were all much more concerned about the how and the who — how would Ted meet the woman of his dreams? And who was she? The show zipped right through that series-long mystery in its last episode to deal us a harsh life lesson: that sometimes life can be crappy. Thank you, Craig Thomas and Carter Bays. We had no idea.
My one wish for How I Met Your Father is that it doesn’t make this mistake over again. If I happen to get invested in this show — and there’s a good chance I will — I just want to know that Hilary Duff actually gets what we’re all after in this life, and it isn’t ripped from her because a showrunner wants to be clever.
Let the “How” be the twist this time around, and let the happy couple ride off into the sunset. What happens after can be left unknown, in the way that we don’t have a clue about our own fates.
What we do have, however, is our hope. And we hope for the best.
