For a long time, if you wanted to find episodes of How I Met Your Mother, you needed to go to Hulu for them. They used to be available on Netflix, but left the leading streaming service in 2017. While you can still find HIMYM on Hulu, all nine seasons af the show have returned to Netflix, which gives us a chance to revisit the 2005 pilot and see if it holds up.
HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “The Year 2030.” Two teenagers (Lyndsy Fonseca, David Henrie) sit on a couch. A voice (Bob Saget) says, “Kids, I’m gonna tell you an incredible story; the story of how I met your mother.” The kids ask if they’re being punished for something.
The Gist: That voice is the now older, father-of-two version of Ted Mosby, but the 2005 version (Josh Radnor) he’s telling the story about is 27, an architect, single and living in New York City with his college buddy Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel) and Marshall’s girlfriend Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan).
Marshall is ready to pop the question to Lily, whom he’s been with since freshman year of college. Ted is excited, though he hopes they don’t do it on the kitchen floor again. But something worries him; what’s it going to be like to be single in New York once Marshall and Lily establish their life and family somewhere else?
He calls up his friend Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), who tells him to “suit up!” and join him at McLaren’s Pub, their regular watering hole. Much to Barney’s disappointment, Ted does not suit up, advice Barney has been giving his friend since they randomly met at McLaren’s a few years earlier (they chatted at the urinal and Barney took that as an opening to take Ted under his wing).
Barney wants Ted to be bolder when it comes to meeting women, so he plays, “Have You Met Ted?”, which means he goes up to a random woman, says, “Have you met Ted?” and leaves them to talk.
When Ted sees a beautiful woman across the room, he tells Barney that she could be “the one,” so Barney plays “Have you met Ted?” again. The woman, Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), is a reporter for a local cable news station. The two of them hit it off immediately; Ted even tells Robin she can throw a drink in his face to satisfy her friends, who are there to support someone who just had a breakup. They make plans to go out the next night.
They hit it off even better at dinner the next night; Robin even laughs when Ted calls a bright blue French Horn hanging on the wall a “Smurf penis.” And, as Ted tells Marshall and Lily later that night, she hates olives; Lily has an “olive theory” based on her and Marshall that if one likes olives and the other doesn’t, the couple is compatible. But the night is cut off when Robin is pulled into her first breaking news story at work; Marshall, Lily and Barney all think Robin gave Ted “the signal,” while Ted isn’t sure.
But, knowing that Robin will be leaving for a work trip to Orlando for a week (“that’s a year in hot girl time,” says Barney), Ted decides to throw caution to the wind and go back to her place that night to kiss her. This involves the French Horn, the whole gang in a cab, and a driver named Ranjit (Marshall Manesh), but Ted blows it in a way that, as we find out later, only Ted Mosby can. But not all is lost.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s not a stretch that How I Met Your Mother was a Xennial version of Friends; of course, it took on its own identity over its nine-year run on CBS (2005-14).
Our Take: How I Met Your Mother‘s creators, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, hit on a great hook for their show: Have it be a long story that older Ted tells his kids about how he met their mother. Because of that hook, and how the first episode ended, viewers were hooked in, eager to see just who “the mother” was. But it also was the strength of the five main characters, and their chemistry with each other, that got them to stick around through the ups and downs of the show’s run.
It’s not often you can look back on the pilot of a long-running show and see that the characters were pretty much the same as what they ended up being when the show ended. HIMYM is one of those shows, and that’s thanks to Bays and Thomas taking the time to think about the main characters’ lives, ensure that most of the humor of the show comes from the characters’ personalities and motivations, and map out a multi-season story that takes all the characters into account.
The format of the show, with its flashbacks and forwards, was also in place in the first episode. Expertly directed by Pamela Fryman, it set a strong template for the show’s run. It’s a format that’s tough to pull off in a live-action, four-camera sitcom, which is a big reason why Fryman directed 95% of the show’s 200+ episodes. That consistency is something that leads fans of the show to rewatch it, because they don’t have to skip early episodes because the characters or format were so different than what they ended up becoming.
Looking at the pilot with almost 20 years (!) of hindsight, there isn’t all that much that seems cringeworthy now. Yes, even Barney’s piggishness — he seems fascinated with Lebanese women in the first episode — isn’t all that awful to watch because he’s called on it by Lily more than once. There’s a moment of gay panic on Marshall’s part, but that moment isn’t as jarring as some similar moments would be later in that first season.
Really, the only thing that changes how we view the pilot is the show’s 2014 finale. Yes, that finale, where Old Ted finishes up the story he’s telling his kids, after finally revealing how he met their mother. One twist: The mother, Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti), had an untimely demise, and Ted’s kids encourage him to go back to “Aunt Robin” and give the two of them another try.
We all know why that finale didn’t work; Bays and Thomas pretty much executed their Day 1 plan even though the show — and the relationships between the characters — had evolved beyond that plan. Yes, given the chemistry that Radnor and Smulders had in the pilot, it was a shock when Old Ted calls her “Aunt Robin” to his kids. But nine years later, there was too much evidence that Ted and Robin weren’t going to work as a couple, that Robin and Barney were much more suited for each other, and that we wanted to see Ted and Tracy have the happy ending that was never really in the cards in the show’s master plan.
The HIMYM pilot reminds us of how promising the Ted-Robin coupling was going to be, but it also reminds us that Bays and Thomas effectively avoided having them become the “Ross and Rachel” of the series, where their inevitable pairing hun over the entire run. By the time the ninth season, which took place entirely in the days leading up to Robin and Barney’s wedding because Bays and Thomas had expected to end the show after eight seasons, fans were as moved on from Robin and Ted as a couple as the characters themselves were.
Sex and Skin: None, besides some dirty talk from Lily — an example of character traits that Bays and Thomas had baked into their characters from the pilot onward — and Barney’s verbal antics.
Parting Shot: When the kids hear that Old Ted is talking about “Aunt Robin,” Ted says, “Relax, I’m getting to it. Like I said, it’s a long story,” and we see Ted, Barney, Lily and Marshal drinking at McLaren’s with Ranjit (whom we’ll see here and there during the show’s entire run).
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Joe Nieves as Carl, the McLaren’s bartender that would be one of those side characters who were around for the entire nine years of the series.
Most Pilot-y Line: For some reason, Marshall is afraid of popping a Champagne cork, and hits Lily in the eye with it when they celebrate after their engagement. Lily ends up with an eye patch, but loses it after one too many pirate jokes from Barney. And when she takes it off, the eye looks completely fine, like nothing happened. Only a day had passed since she got hit.
Our Call: STREAM IT. How I Met Your Mother‘s pilot holds up after 19 years because the characters and the show’s overall story were well thought out by Bays and Thomas. That’s certainly something we can’t say about a whole lot of sitcoms.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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