Last week I was forced out of retirement to re-explain the end of How I Met Your Mother to people on YouTube who just didn’t get it, man. That re-awakened my long-dormant fandom for the series, which has had the side effect of waking up every morning the past few days with “Let’s Go To The Mall” going through my head1In the running with “the cake is a lie” as one of those brilliant pop culture ideas that got ruined by excessive repetition.
I honestly can’t tell if it’s ironic or completely predictable that a series all about nostalgia has triggered a fierce nostalgia in me for the early 2000s. And I’d never made the connection before, but that period — from around 2003 to around 2008 — was the time before Twitter really took off.
To be honest, I probably overestimate the impact Twitter had on pop culture, and we were all headed towards being cynical, pedantic, self-righteous, and bitter anyway. But I still get super-strong feelings of “They couldn’t make a show like that nowadays!” when I think about the early seasons of How I Met Your Mother.
My memory of the show is that it was always wildly veering between sentimental and cynical, postmodern and old-fashioned, arch and earnest, prudish and raunchy, clever and corny. The lasting appeal of the series2In addition to the obvious “parasocial relationships with unnaturally attractive and clever people,” of course is that it didn’t try to safely thread the needle between those extremes, but would eagerly go from one to the other and back again.
Twitter — or I guess more accurately, the “extremely online” culture that is most easily personified by Twitter — kind of grew up along with the series. I always think of “Twitter culture” as being filled with Mean Girls and people who’ve been so over-fed on popular media for so long that they’re obsessed with it but can’t enjoy any of it. Any sign of sentimentality or sincerity is seen as a sign of weakness that needs to be stamped out. I often found myself thinking, “Am I allowed to admit that I like this? Or is it too corny?”
At the time, I lumped the series in with the Judd Apatow Cinematic Universe3Based solely on the movies; I never saw Freaks and Geeks. And yes, I do own the DVDs and am aware that I should watch them. I promise I will someday before I die.: a network television version of the sentimental raunchiness of Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin and such. But now in retrospect, I think it’s a more specific offshoot of that: the extremely-marketable earnestness of Jason Segel projects.
The first episode I strongly remember of How I Met Your Mother was one in the first season called “The Duel.” I remember being curious about the show mainly because Alyson Hannigan was in it, and I was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But I was wary of it, because it was a sitcom on a major network — by that point, I had learned that my previous love of the series Friends was something that I should be deeply embarrassed about. “The Duel” culminates in Ted and Marshall having a sword fight in their apartment, and it actually made me uncomfortable just how much the show wanted to be liked for its quirky characters and their irrepressible antics.
And yet there was something appealing about the goofiness of it all. It was a bit like David Bowie in the “Dancing in the Street” video: that whole thing seems like it should’ve been a career-ending, burn-all-the-tapes level misstep, but somehow Bowie seems so confidently goofy4And, I guess in retrospect, horny that I believe he’s the only one who comes through unscathed. There’s a bit in “The Duel” where (if I remember correctly) Marshall is trying to stay angry but can’t resist getting sucked into a swordfight, and he says with a sense of resignation, “Damn, that’s intriguing.” That’s always felt like a line that only Segel would be able to pull off, and it also sums up how I felt about the show at the time: I wish I were too cool for this, but I can’t help but love it.
Segel wrote and starred in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which seemed semi-autobiographical to the degree that I have a hard time telling how much of his performances in that, How I Met Your Mother, and The Muppets were characters vs how much is really him. And while the one thing that most people remember about that movie was that he has an extended nude scene at the beginning, where Kristen Bell’s character breaks up with him, that wasn’t the most interesting thing about the movie. It was all anybody talked about at the time, too, which I guess was good for marketing, but I think misses the point entirely. I mean, I admire anyone with an “average by Hollywood standards” body being comfortable and anti-prudish enough to go on screen with no clothes on, but I think it was a lot more daring to write a sex comedy that was so heavily based on a rock opera about Dracula completely performed by puppets.
It was such a raw display of I don’t care if you get it enthusiasm that was rare back in 2008 and feels all but extinct now. I don’t want to brag or anything, but I’m pretty sure I could find you a picture of a dude’s hog within one minute using 2023’s internet. It’s much more difficult to find anyone prominent professing their love for something niche and nerdy in a way that feels genuine.5Yeah, I know Joe Mangianello loves D&D and Henry Cavill paints Warhammer figures. I’m still cautiously optimistic that we can get rid of the clout-chasing and gate-keeping, and just get back to enjoying stuff. A time before any dipshit even thought of using “cringe” as an adjective.