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20 Years of How I Met Your Mother
A lonely man’s tale of justifying a rekindled love
Debuting the year after Friends went off the air, you could be forgiven for thinking that a sitcom centred on five twentysomethings living in New York City was just another clone, yet How I Met Your Mother was anything but. Told as a series of flashbacks to his kids in the year 2030, Ted Mosby (Narrated by Bob Sagat, played by Josh Radnor) recalls the series of events that had to happen for him to have met their mother. Along the way he revels in the parallel escapades of his roommate Marshal Eriksen (Jason Segel) and Marshal’s girlfriend Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan), their womanising friend Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) and newfound crush Robin Scherbatzky (Cobie Smulders).
How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) was a breath of fresh air in the sitcom space in 2005. With schedules still recovering from the loss of the Central Perk gang and 20 years of Frasier Crane, the show found popularity with its innovative non-linear storytelling. The writers of the show, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas based the first few seasons on their own post-college years with its depictions of expensive nightclubs, damp squib New Years and a guy willing to go the extra mile for a girl to be incredibly relatable, their age of life largely paralleling my own at the time.
