"How I Met Your Mother": Twelve laughing viewers

   Joe Lo Truglio, Jason Segel, and Joe Manganiello in
   "How I Met Your Mother"

Tearing into "How I Met Your Mother" has really lost all purpose, since it's had the same, unwavering problems for a few years now and we're in so deep that nothing's going to change. But tonight's episode really ramped up both the sexism and contempt for the audience enough that I felt I needed to make fun of it. Also, it would be a shame to have no posts for November, despite promising myself I'd write a thing about my recent "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" catchup.

Perhaps I should follow in the footsteps of Pete Wells from The New York Times and write this solely in rhetorical questions. For example, HIMYM, do you actually believe that women are irresponsible human beings, unable to be tasked with the decision of determining guilt impartially when confronted with an attractive man? Is it completely logical to you that a jury, meant to reflect and represent society at large, would be made up entirely of people of the same sex? As a show that once gave us episodes as funny as "Slap Bet" and with devastatingly great performances as "Bad News," does the laugh track have to guffaw every time that Joe Manganiello shortens words? Is it really the right decision to have Josh Radnor at 38 playing a teenager when it was implausible enough to believe him at 32 playing Ted's college-aged self? And years after anyone lost interest in anyone's jobs (or their personal lives, really), what is the excuse for sending Marshall into new professional territory after having him flounder for so many seasons that isn't simply the easiness of lazy writing and time wasting?

With Angus T. Jones joining a cult, the fate of the ridiculously expensive "Two and a Half Men" remains in doubt, and I worry that CBS will be hesitant to let two of its most successful comedies go in the same year. And really, I've come to the conclusion that at this point, certain shows only exist to give Dennis Haskins a paying job. Though he did appear as the head of desserts last season, "Mad Men" was not one of them. This one is.

16 new episodes remain this season. Good lord, may they be the last 16 I ever see.

In which I defend a show I'm not particularly fond of at the moment

Every Monday, a video preview of that night's episode of "How I Met Your Mother" - be it a new episode or a rerun - goes up on the show's official Facebook page run by CBS. And every week, I continue to find the comments on those posts annoy me to no end. So allow me to vent about the ways in which other people vent: the weekly complaints follow.

1) "Another rerun??? Omg lyk u guys need to get it together, why is there only 1 nu ep each month? Gosh!!!!!!" (15-25 likes) - This is irritating to anyone familiar with how television works. There are 24 episodes a season and 36 weeks in the broadcast television season. That means that 12 times during the season, CBS cannot air a new episode of the show. It's always been that way. This is not a new phenomenon that's suddenly appeared this year. There are sweeps periods (periods in which television ratings are tracked to determine advertising costs on each show) every year in November, February, and May. Expect new episodes in the fall, but once the new year hits, don't look for them outside of sweeps. It's just how television works. Remember in the fall when we got 11 new episodes in a row? That's why there's reruns now. Accept it. Move on. Far better shows are not on the air at all.

2) "Omg finaly a new ep! It's been months since the last new episode!!!" (20-30 likes) - Same complaint, worded differently depending on a rerun or a new episode. Again, you're wrong, and get over it.

3) "This video is not available in your geographic region? That's sooo racist. Where do I live,, Narnia?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" (5-12 likes) - People seem to think that CBS has it out for the international viewers of their shows by geo-filtering their material so that it can only be viewed within the United States. In reality, there are copious legal issues that prevent CBS from displaying video content in different countries. CBS does not hate your homeland, they just can't be bothered to sort out the legal issues of every specific country and different advertisers to display worldwide-viewable videos. Also, maybe this is just because I'm a Canadian and we get nearly every American show same day here, but why don't you just wait 10 hours and watch the episode? Is the preview all that necessary? And every person uses the Narnia joke. We get it, Narnia is a fictional location from a children's book hidden away from the rest of the civilized world. Someone on the page claimed the joke isn't funny anymore, but my response is that it wasn't ever funny. Finally, claims on the page that CBS doesn't care about anyone that isn't American or gives them money is also ridiculous - cock blocking you out of a 30 second promo doesn't give them extra bags of money to use as napkins. Any excuse to bag on the U.S. is a popular sentiment among those who are not American.

4) The show sucks now, you're going in circles, reveal the mother, end the show already (4-5 likes) - Okay yeah, can't argue with this one.

And if you continue to post such bullshit:

"How I Met Your Mother": State of the sitcom address

My brother and sister-in-law started watching "How I Met Your Mother" a couple years ago, and seemed to really be liking it for the most part. So this past April, over the Easter weekend, I went back and began catching up on all six seasons. Conveniently, my aunt had bought the first four seasons of the show on DVD under the assumption she would start watching them at some point, but it turns out I got to them first.

It took me only a month to get caught up, and the fact that the show's early seasons felt so natural and fluid only encouraged me to watch at a rate of about eight episodes a night. Along with "The Big Bang Theory," it remains one of only two TV comedies with a laugh track that I watch - only "HIMYM" feels like a show that probably wouldn't have a laugh track nor be filmed with multiple cameras were it not aired on CBS. The structure of the show is such that it can't even be filmed in front of an audience because the number of flashbacks and cutaways on the show, as well as its use of narration, would make the show feel like a "hostage situation" for a live audience, according to its creators. More importantly, the comedy of the show is genuinely funny enough to make me laugh; the same can't always be said for "TBBT".

Somewhere along its run, however, "HIMYM" has lost its way. I know this because every TV critic has been saying it and writing about it for a while now. A friend who watches and loves the show and I were texting the other night about the current state of the show, as we've done many times before. And each time I feel like we're going to talk in circles again about the show's flaws, we always seem to find new areas of concern or trace problems back to possible origins that we hadn't thought about before.