Language: English
Nostalgia is a sort of reckoning. It hits you, maybe, at points where you feel bereft, drained by the present. When I heard that How I Met Your Mother was going to have a stand-alone sequel all I could offer was disdain. Not because a bunch of business execs thought it was a good idea to rehash something old in a new skin, because let’s be honest, it happens all the time but because even by the original’s pouty, snuggly standards a navel-gazing sitcom about white folks hopping from one almost-relationship to the other sounds dated. Not only are we now attuned to better quality fare but the complexities of modern relationships far overreach the pompous assumptions of the sitcoms of yore. And so while How I Met Your Father is more diverse and seemingly assembled in the present it is so utterly boring, wasteful and lifeless that like one of Ted Mosby’s many dates, it feels like an unnecessary, gibberish detour from a better story.
There was a time somewhere in the middle of How I Met Your Mother that tested the patience of even the most ardent fans of the franchise. HIMYM as it came to be known was a rosier than thou substitute for Friends, a show it almost emulated other than in places where it was pushed to do something of its own. But while Friends was about ‘the friends’, HIMYM you could argue wanted to be about how Ross and Rachel got together. Ted Mosby moseyed around town relentlessly pursuing relationships with the ballistic denial of the hero left with one bullet in his gun. Except the bullet was us and a mediocre show continued to fire us past the obvious, until in the end, in a stunningly underwhelming finale even by sitcom finale standards, confirmed it had indeed done so. It’s the kind of punch to the drained gut that makes the prime of youth feel like the bend in the lower back earned at the altar of pointless nights spent binge-watching.
In this new version, Hillary Duff plays Sophie the punch-drunk girl seeking love in a series populated by new characters, but familiar structures. Sophie meets yappy comrades in Valentina, Jessie, Charlie, Sid and more who are caricatures rather than layered, complex people. Wearing the diversity badges are Suraj Sharma as Sid, the personality-less bar-owner and Tien Tran as the spiky Ellen, sister to Jesse played by the somewhat dreamy but ultimately forgettable, Chris Lowell. There are enough ‘types’ here to think that some friction would magically set something alight the show is so lazily conceived it almost feels like a sedated version of the original which is like saying ‘in this one they really drown’.
Marshall and Lily’s cutesy couple grew to become the soul of the original series not because they were written audaciously but because they captured the goofiness of growing older together. It’s easy, obviously, to be pulled in by the dramatism of a Barney, but it was really the couple - not to mention Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan’s acting - that held the ground in a show that every now and then seemed both adrift a little too daft for the age it was playing out in.
The inherent romanticism of the format – the story behind how I met the ‘one’ – is carried over to this reboot with social media, influencers and tinder thrown into the mix, but the writing itself has a problem of blushing before the punchline, of which there are precious few.
Okay there was maybe one joke in the fourth episode that kind of sticks but the rest of it is so meanderingly passé and half-hearted, it might as well be called ‘How I Almost Never Told You This Needless Story’.
What is perhaps most offensive about this new version is that it is not even an adequate or perhaps worthy homage to the despotic romanticism of the original. It wants to be raunchier but doesn’t quite have the language to do it. It definitely wants to be diverse with eye-lash curling casting choices and LGBTQ relationships, but there are no definitive outlines to any of the characters it hovers over. It doesn’t help that the show thinks casting types – the handsome British guy, the charming brown dude from downstairs, or the peppy Asian – is all it takes to build an interesting ensemble.
It’s almost as if these people stumble into each other on a daily basis with little or literally no understanding of who the other person is. If this is a comment on the obscuring effects of modern love/social media on the glorious two-fold tales of romance then well, message delivered. Except HIMYF is so banal and untrained in its methods its comedy exists without the punchlines, faces jolly around without evolving into characters and nostalgia stares into your eyes painfully mindful of its own shallowness. So much so that even the good-looking young people in meet-cute woke relationships in this lethargically made show, can only make us wonder if everyone who doesn’t last the entirety of this tedious format, as a character, is a survivor, or maybe even a winner.
How I Met Your Father is streaming in India on Disney+ Hotstar.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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