Sitcom Analysis: CBS' How I Met Your Mother

Picture this: you're explaining to your tween-age children every event that took place from when you first met your current wife to the day you got married. For many of us it's a long, winding story of coincidences, break-ups, make-ups and finally the wedding day. How I Met Your Mother is exactly that show and for a sitcom, it's actually pretty darn funny and well-formatted.

I've probably seen 15 or so episodes of this show and there hasn't been one where I just didn't laugh out loud at some point. It is basically centered on the premise I described above with the focus on two couples and a "5^th wheel", so to speak. When one man's best friend got engaged to his longtime girlfriend, he decided he wanted to start looking for a potential wife himself, utilizing the help of his perennial bachelor buddy and the new engagees to filter out good women from bad women.

The engaged couple, Marshall and Lilly (played by Jason Segel and Buffy's Alyson Hannigan), are permanently attached at the hip and share an almost sickeningly sweet relationship that isn't flawless but makes you secretly melt on the inside. The looking-for-love Ted (Josh Radnor) had a crush on a common friend Robin (Cobie Smulders) that finally, after a series of strange dates with even stranger women. Somewhere in the dsitant future, Ted and Robin are married with two children whom Ted narrates this story to.

The 5^th wheel, Barney, is played by Neil Patrick Harris of Doogie Howser fame. He is by far the most entertaining character on a sitcom today. Barney is a well-suited bachelor who thinks he knows the ins and outs of successful dating and womanizing scams. Although many actors play roles far away from their true character, Harris is even more unbelievably talent at this since he recently came out to the public as a homosexual.

Barney has his own language of dating and seems to come up with new words every episode (as annotated on his blog on cbs.com). Some of the more humorous ones have been "phone five", the exchange of high-fives with cell phones, and "bpegs"- the image of a woman's, umm, upper body as stored in the brain.

What makes this show from being a basic, drab sitcom that tries to stay hip is in the format. For one, it is basically flashbacks of the past, but within those episodes other mini-flashbacks are used to explain current situations. It's a hard thing to do, but well-played. Also, How I Met Your Mother isn't afraid to take risks with out-of-the-ordinary techniques. For instance, there was a scene where Ted, Marshall and Barney went to a nightclub to pick up women.

Almost every minute of the nightclub scene was pantomimed with subtitles because that's exactly how it is at a loud night club. Barney found himself dancing from behind with what seemed like a very attractive woman, Barney communicating with the other boys with facial expressions of "oh, yeah."

It turns out later the woman was Barney's first cousin whom he hadn't seen in years. That incident was quickly sworn to secrecy.

The writing in How I Met Your Mother is pretty on-top as far as outlining quirky little things that friends in their post-college years share. My favorite episode involved the"slap bet." Robin had a dark secret from her past that kept her from going to malls. Marshall thought she was previously married in a mall, whereas Barney believed she was a former porn star.

They used a "slap bet" for wager, where the winner gets to slap the loser as hard as he could without repercussions or warning 5 times. Ouch. And you know how that goes; rules are made up on the spot, with exceptions to every exception, etc. The episode was so popular it sparked a poll on CBS.com on what would you rather take- 5 unannounced slaps or 10 in a row? I'll take 10, please, with a bag of ice and a some Motrin.

I won't say who won, but Barney did end up taking quite a beating.

Although I usually stray away from anything labeled "sitcom", it's good to see a show like this on television that isn't afraid to take chances and strays away from the typical way to tell a story. There really are, as Shakespeare says, only a handful of plots left in the world. How I Met Your Mother tells the love story plot-only in reverse and in a funny way.