Because it was on TV: How "How I Met Your Mother" Secretly Became a Ridiculously Long-Lived and Successful Show

You ever wake up and realize that How I Met Your Mother is on its ninth season, has one of the best casts on television, is currently CBS' greatest sitcom, and is going out with a run that's completely breaking its mold while remaining true to its core roots and form?

It's always nice to see Wayne Brady not on a
gameshow, Whose Line, or Chappelle. Wait, has
he ever done anything else besides HIMYM?

I had that moment a few months ago as I set it in to see the writers pull off the unbelievable - an entire season set during a single weekend at a Wedding in the fictional Farhampton, NY. And it's not even the wedding we've all been craving since this damn thing premiered in 2005. No other show has delivered blue balls with such panache as HIMYM, except for maybe LOST. Both shows were actually more victims of uncertain renewals or cancellations affecting their narrative rather than true fault of their own. LOST spun its wheels for years before resolving to end itself after six years, about three and a half or so of them good. In its case, an ending date was the best thing for it, because after years of faulty promises and dead ends, the narrative was able to conclude itself.

HIMYM is the same way. It resisted splurging on The Mother too early and then letting the show loose all its momentum. It did, however, loose a good amount of traction when it kept coming back for more seasons without a definitive end. Without that end, the story could only be stretched thinner. Thus we're presented a problem with endlessly renewable television whose meta-narrative superposes some fixed ending objective. Where do we go? Blow the wad and let the stories dry up or resist and...let the stories dry up? It's a rough commodity. With a light at the end of the tunnel finally granted, though, HIMYM kicked itself into high gear and lurched towards its conclusion.

Despite this, it's not like anyone actually cares. Well, maybe these guys do. The core premise is fun to be reminded of once in a while, but it's essentially become a meager excuse to follow the lives of characters played by actors who should have left the show years ago. Alyson Hannigan, coming off of American Pie and Buffy was arguable the series' biggest "get" when it premiered in 2005, although her career may now be the weakest. Neil Patrick Harris may have been the other big name, Dougie Houser basically irrelevant, but mostly gaining notoriety from Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004). His star has only continued to rise. Throw them in with Cobie "Maria Hill" Smulders and Jason "Muppets" Segel, and it's a pretty potent cast. Of course, Josh Radnor still sucks, ironically enough as the main character of the show.

The show has also always had a unique structure. Blending both three-camera and single camera sitcom conventions, most scenes are shot without a studio audience, and then edited together with flashbacks, flash-forwards, callback jokes, and other montages. The whole thing is then shown to a studio audience, where the laugh track is recorded. Unnecessary? Probably, but the result is a comfortable-feeling sitcom without many of the cringe-worthy jokes (looking at you, 2 Broke Girls) or necessary pauses for the audience to settle down from laughing or clapping for a character's entrance (Hello, Seinfeld). All this built until Season 9, its final season, when it took this structure and gave it a nice big bag of crack.

Ditto with Marshall's Odyssey.

Last night's episode, "Bass Player Wanted" (S9;E13), was emblematic of this, and likely the most energizing of the season so far, especially after the previous episodes, "Bedtime Stories" (S9;E11) and "Rehearsal Dinner" (S9;E12) were both kind of clunky and got away from the season's core conceit. Both of these earlier episodes relied too heavily on flashbacks that made the episodes essentially identical to any other season - the gang moping around New York City, dealing with dating problems. "Bass Player Wanted," however, introduced the first interaction between Ted and The Mother and set a solid stage for their hook-up to enfold.

The season is a slow burn through highlighting small moments over the course of a single weekend, but there's still a hefty dose of character development and interaction, as well as some classic sitcom-y premises, such as Robin and Barney's mother engaging in a scrambled egg competition ("The Lighthouse" [S9;E8]). Thus it's able to transport both its characters and conventions into a different lens, almost completely located in the Farhampton Inn, with the Inn's Bar and Bedrooms doubling for McClaren's and any given apartment in respective postmodern fashion.

It's been a refreshing ride for a stale show that has jerked its audience around for nine years. Part of its brilliance is in its boldness and its ability to handle both its long-term arcs as well as its smaller, doofier moments with aplomb. How will it all end? Naturally with Ted getting together with The Mother, even though we've more or less seen that already. More than seeing them together, it's about the payoff - has this broad really been worth it? Based on "Bass Player Wanted," the answer so far is hell yeah, but we'll have to keep watching to find out.

How I Met Your Mother comes on Mondays at 8:00 pm EST - it's the only CBS show worth watching right now. Invest some time.

Because it was on TV: The Complex Evolution of The Simpsons and Why New Isn't Bad

We've reached a tipping point, folks. Actually, at this point we're probably at least ten years past the tipping point, if not farther. Nostalgia is a weirdly powerful force that prevents us from having a genuinely critical eye towards what's on the screen. There is surely a lot of hate towards The Simpsons among fans, which has been going on for literally decades now, but I'm here to suggest that's misplaced. This seems to happen to just about every long-gestating show, even one that doesn't recycle its cast or production team like The Simpsons. SNL is another wonderful example of a show that exists in cycles where fans get overly attached to a handful of cast members without recognizing the talent replacing them. Of course, sometimes Charlie Rocket replaces Bill Murray and anger for the good ol' days is justified.

That's neither here nor there. The Simpsons, by the very nature of their longevity, have changed and morphed over the years, mostly adapting to stay relevant in an adult-oriented cartoon genre they helped to create and usher into the mainstream. I believe that fans of the show, myself included, for a long time had equated this adaptation with inferiority. This ideal version of the show existed and canonized itself in my own mind. Evidence of my hypocrisy should already be apparent when I say that my greatest appreciation of the show comes from Seasons 4 - 8.

Santos L. Halper

That's what I'd consider the meat of the series. Seasons 1 - 3 tend to be a little rugged and basic, but many fans appreciated that nature and consider even my "Golden Age" to be a little too wild and ridiculous. Thus, everyone has their own period to fall in love with. I always liked this early middle period for its classic moments, sophisticated yet precise storytelling, and universe expansion.

So, what happend with Season 9? I'd argue that things started getting wackier with Season 8, with much more high concept episodes such as "You Only Move Twice" (S8;E2), "The Homer They Fall" (S8;E3) and "Mountain of Madness" (S8;E12). It has a tremendous amount of self-commentary already, though ("The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochy Show" [S8;E1], "Homer's Enemy" [S8;E23]) as well as solid character-centric episodes ("Hurricane Neddy" [S8;E8], "Grade School Confidential" [S8;E19], "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson" [S8;E25]). Seasons 9 - 12 would consist of more of the former than the latter, with jokes turning more towards wacky rather than subtle.

The amount of "classic" moments would seem to dwindle from Season 13 on. Then again, this may only be due to an inability to memorize 25 seasons of a series. You'll find that I have an intimate knowledge of what is now barely a fifth of the entire series. I can only pick out a few favorites from this time that come to mind ("How I Spent My Strummer Vacation" (S14;E2), "There's Something About Marrying" [S16;E10], "Future-Drama" [S16;E15], "Milhouse of Sand and Fog" [S17;E3], "24 Minutes" [S18;E21], "You Kent Always Say What You Want" [S18;E22]). I'll generally interpret these years as pretty rough, but that's only because they were different. The pinnacle may be "That 90s Show" (S19;E11), which features revisionist history less in tune with the tongue-in-cheek commentary of previous flashback episodes and exists more as a hollow parade of pop culture gags. I have a few theories as to why this era, beginning around the turn of the century, was painful:

1) The Loss of Phil Hartman. This may be a stretch, but to when Phil Hartman was murdered in 1998, the world not only lost his live action comedic gifts, but a tremendous amount of Simpsons characters, most notably Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz. To this day I still consider Phil Hartman's death one of the more significant comedic losses of all-time, and Gil Gunderson, though amusing in his own right, never had the panache of Hutz as the inept family lawyer.

2) Phil may be a stretch, I mean, characters come and go, but more important at the turn of the century suddenly The Simpsons found itself with plenty of competition, from South Park to Family Guy, and even their closer neighbors Futurama and King of the Hill. Nowadays, it's even crazier, with American Dad, The Cleveland Show, Bob's Burgers, Archer and plenty other adult-oriented cartoon shows to watch, many of which are damned good. Family Guy especially though, forced The Simpsons to re-discover its own identity amidst genre and pop culture satire, and South Park's insanely quick turnaround caused The Simpsons' 9-month delay in commenting on contemporary events look dated. For many years in the early noughts, the show didn't know what it should be, so it spun off in many weird directions in an attempt to differentiate itself from both its earlier years and from its competitors.

That brings us to now. Starting from Season 20 or so on, the show has gotten incredibly good once again. It has gained an ability to hit deeper and harder than it ever has ("The Squirt and the Whale" [S21;E19]), while simultaneously moving into refreshingly experimental ways, most notably in its couch gags, some of which carry on for three or four minutes. The most famous of these lately are probably the ones by Banksy and Guillermo del Toro, but it's now a regular thing for the show to open with some cray sequence.

"Homerland" was vintage Simpsons - a pitch perfect
episode-centric parody of a show with
significant cultural cache that I've never seen.

Rather than regurgitating itself, the show has come to appreciate its own history while pushing itself in new directions. It's found its identity as the grandaddy of all cartoons and acts fully irreverent, perhaps more so than it did when it began. It's a show with nothing to lose. The Simpsons has always done everything it could have ever wanted to do. As soon as it accepted that fact, it was able to crank out some new really great shows, some with a great outside-the-box experimentation, like "Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words" (S20;E6), "Moe Goes from Rags to Riches" (S23;E12), "The Saga of Carl" (S24;E21), and this year's "Homerland" (S25;E1), "Four Regrettings and a Funeral" (S25;E3), and "Labor Pains" (S25;E5).

In effect, the show has gone full circle. It's not dependent on anything. Similar to the kind of renegade attitude it had when it first started, since there's actually less of a critical eye on them now, with no one seeing how they react to Family Guy or whatever, the show is able to do whatever it wants. With the twenty-five year proven track record and its status as an American institution secured in the 90s, it is free to be as great or shitty as it wants to be. Nothing it does matters any more. With nothing to lose, the writers are even more free to completely break form and create any kind of episode, sketch, short story, canon-questionable episode it wants. Season 25 so far has been spectacular. It comes on tonight at 8:00 pm EST on FOX.

First Impressions: 12 Years a Slave

Every year there tends to be a hot film that many critics immediately jump on and anoint the "Greatest Film of the Year." This happened with Slumdog Millionaire (2008) a ways back, with Argo (2012) last year, and already 12 Years a Slave (2013) is getting the kind of ridiculous buzz reserved for runaway Oscar winners, or at least close calls.

So, is 12 Years a Slave legit?

The acting is astoundingly passionate; the cinematography is careful, sustained, and gorgeous; and it masterfully handles some pretty tricky subject matter. Perhaps if Django Unchained (2012) wasn't so fresh in my mind the film would have impacted me a bit more, but 12 Years doesn't seem special enough to be considered an instantaneous classic. That being said, it is an extremely artfully constructed film whose most substantial impact will be demonstrating an intricate look at the horrors of slave life in a film that doesn't feature Tupac and Jim Croce on the soundtrack. Bits and spoilers follow in this discussion of the film and its cultural merits.

There is a non-stop stream of familiar faces in this flick, and most of them kill it. Some literally. Perennially impossible to spell Chiwetal Ejiofor grounds the film with this sullen, trying performance full of the really concerned looks he perfected on the set of 2012 (2009). From there we're weaved in and out of brief appearances from Michael K. Williams, Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Paul Dano who all play a bit out of their wheelhouse. Except for Omar, of course. One of the more bizarre casting moments comes from kidnapper Taran Killam, who we always knew had that evil him after playing Mandrew...

And introducing Brad Pitt as Amish Jesus

But let's talk about some of the big names and standouts here. Mike Fassbender plays the slave-owner Epps with an insane abandon and chews scenery like a maniac. After two underrated roles in Steve McQueen films Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011) he may finally get some serious attention here. On the opposite site is Lupita Nyong'o who is really the breakout star here after getting the most on-screen punishment since JC in The Passion of the Christ (2004). Nyong'o's Patsey has this terrifying complex relationship with Epps and his wife (American Horror Story's Sarah Paulson), based on love, admiration, torture, neglect, jealousy, and rape. If anything in this film can be a microcosm for the peculiar institution it's that relationship, which is destroying and sustaining Epps at the same time at the expense of an entire people.

Lastly we have Brad Pitt, who helped produce this film (he really wants that Oscar like his buddy George), who plays the Canadian Bass who just kind of shows up at the end and saves Ejiofor's Solomon Northrup. It's fitting that Pitt cast himself as this white savior who is one of the only white folk in the movie to have a problem with slavery (of course he's a Canuck), and claims that mailing Northrup's letter would come at great personal danger to himself. If any of this danger was apparent, the ending may not have seemed so sudden and anti-climactic. I'm glad Brad got to keep his flowing locks, though.

Some of this suddenness, though, works with the core conceits of the film. As a Free Negro, Solomon Northrup is not legally different from anyone sitting in a modern audience, and the film aptly displays the horrifying notion that at any moment we could be snagged, tagged, and sent down to Louisiana to pick cotton and be whipped for a dozen seasons. It's not totally unlike Gladiator (2000) in this core premise, which also shows that life really sucked in an age where identity was difficult to prove and at any time you could just be kidnapped and sold into slavery. Sucks. With true powerlessness, Northrup's adventure finishes as abruptly as it begins. At its heart, this is the biggest thematic difference it has with Django and makes it worth watching for its own worth.

When I gave my impressions of Django last year, what impressed me most from a narrative stand point was how near the end of the film (SPOILERS HERE, TOO), Django (Jamie Fozz) and Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) basically lose - they are found out by Calvin Candie (Leo DiCap), and are presented with his terms. When Schultz cannot abide this, he kills Candie, which really screws over Django, who no longer has any white advocates or saviors left in the film. Naturally then, he's able to rely on his own wits and training, and save the day by himself. It's a statement of Black Empowerment, both in the meta of the film itself (Django appropriating Candie's clothing, moving from a passive to a dominant force in the final minutes and implementing his own developed style), and in the larger narrative of slave-themed films.

12 Years gives us the opposite. It presents a hopelessness to slavery. Despite Northrup's wits, intelligence, passion, and hearty nature, he is routinely rendered powerless, even though he asserts himself far more often than Django does. He is only saved when he first encounters someone sympathetic to his cause, which takes twelve years since his abduction.

That Shark grew a beard!

Tarantino in both Django and Inglourious Basterds (2009) also presented this very black and white morality. In both of these films, evil is assuredly destroyed by any means necessary, and part of what makes the ending of Django so delightful is how every evil character gets their comeuppance. 12 Years presents this as a wishful fantasy. No one is punished. Not the kidnappers, the slave traders, not even the sadistic Epps. The only thing Epps loses is a single slave, and perhaps a small amount of dignity. Patsey remains on the plantation to be raped and beaten. Slavery remains as an institution to destroy a race of humanity. There is no satisfaction to be had. Northrup himself, though publishing the book this film is based on in 1853, ends up dying in obscurity, possibly due to a second kidnapping. It's a hard, realistic looks at the peculiar institution, and the absence of critical information, the confusion, and limited viewpoints of every character reflects the times with greater accuracy than perhaps any prior film. This is starting to get at why 12 Years is actually special.

To some extent, the film also demonstrates Northrup's constant struggle with identity. He never really fits in on the plantation, and for the majority of the film he does not interact with his fellow slaves or masters if he can help it. He only really interjects when one of them is inconsolable or approaches him for help. Northrup isn't ever comfortable with his new Southern Life, and retains his cold New York demeanor until the burial of an older slave while working a field. There he finally breaks down and joins in during a Spiritual. It's at this moment where Northrup starts accepting his identity as Platt, although there isn't much more development of this idea, perhaps because he's soon after presented to Brad Pitt / Jesus and a means toward freedom.

The cinematography also funds this concept, though. The camera is often tight and close on Northrup and there are long moments of him just sitting or starting into the camera. Throughout the entire film he's struggling with the concept of what being Black is - because here it's very literally uneducated, unliberated, and subservient. When he breaks any of these social rules, Northrup gets a whoopin. But he can't resign himself to such despair, right? In many ways, this is still the conflict behind finding Black Identity, where normative social constructs of success are synonymous with whiteness and black success is this strange, horrifying "other" that white people fear to acknowledge as legitimate.

This dueling identity also sustains Northrup's battle against true despair, which paralyzes many of his fellow slaves, including Elia and Patsey. Northrup is able to cling to hope because he knows of his true black potential. Patsey is emblematic of the crippling loop of terror that comes with the worst depths of slavery and abuse. If anything, 12 Years a Slave demonstrates that those horrors are not so easily let go.