Mad Men vs. Game of Thrones (part II of) Part 2

Life is a state of Mad Men, with Game of Thrones always creeping in. Mad Men, recreating an era of ersatz American perfection which turned out to be a prison from which America had to escape, and doing so with its own claustrophobic perfection.

Endings are tricky, they're much easier to do well when the show was flawed, because the show can then be about the ending itself. Was there any truly great TV show, or great novel, that landed its ending on a level as estimable as the rest of it? Any story longer than the story itself is not about capturing the story, but the passing of life itself. The passing of life and time can't simply end (unless it's The Sopranos), it has to wind down and show that life still goes on even if we don't see it. 

Mad Men was a victim of its own achievements. It was, in my firm opinion, the greatest TV Drama that ever there was, or ever there could be. But subjecting that level of examination to life as it happens, to 'lifeness', can never be sustained forever. Just as life seems to, the story can go on forever, even if we're not around for it. But in the real world, every story has to end, and it's almost a given that a story that so deeply questions what pure life experience is made of will have no idea how to correctly land its ending, because no person has seen their end and lived to tell us what it's like. There was only one appropriate ending for Mad Men, and it was already used by The Sopranos. 

The final half-season of Mad Men was perhaps its weakest. It did not end with a bang, it simply wound down to an ending that is completely in keeping with the tone of the show itself, yet it felt completely wrong at the same time. To see the shock of Don Draper becoming a fervent follower of an Ashram is so banal, so petty in comparison to the mythic man he once was, that it diminishes this larger-than-life figure to smallness. It leaves a horrible taste in our mouths that we've been following ten years in the life of a man we thought was of mythic dimension, only for him to confess his sins and in his first moment of true vulnerability, show that he's just a human as gullible as the next person. And yet, in keeping with history, in keeping with the tone of the show, it's still absolutely perfect. 

Mad Men is a study in the glories, and the limitations, of perfection. It is as flawless a work of art as has ever been created, but its flawlessness is its flaw. It's a prison from which the only escape is to ignore it. By Season 5, their best in my humble opinion, the world no longer cared about Mad Men. It had moved on to Game of Thrones. Mad Men is about trying to grasp the mysteries of human personality, Game of Thrones is about showing us how cheap human life is. Mad Men is a work whose creator is a single authority who allowed no compromise to his vision and no telegraph as to what was in store. Game of Thrones is a work defined by collaboration, whose plot is developed in concert with the original novelist whose work half the audience already knew from the books before it's shown on TV, and whose work may further be developed by suggestions from the audience. Mad Men is meant as a work of Art with a capital A, Game of Thrones is a work of awful magnificence, but like so many works of great art, it is primarily intended as entertainment. Mad Men is a micro snapshot of our world and history, Game of Thrones is a macro panoramic view of an historical world that isn't even our own. Mad Men deals in perfection, Game of Thrones deals in the infinite. 

Perfection is a prison from which the life force which is nature has to escape. The classical age of TV is over. Mad Men is our Mozart, our Leonardo, our young Shakespeare, our Tolstoy, our Jean Renoir. The elegance, the naturalism, the formal perfection, is so finely honed that the only way forward is to smash the rules it sets out into a million pieces. In the control which the showrunner has, Mad Men recalls the Hollywood's Golden Age of the Director, when Coppola and Scorsese and Altman could fulfil a genuine artistic vision. But in its achievement, perhaps Mad Men goes even past Coppola and Scorsese, with their concessions to potboilerdom, and is an achievement to rival great figures from the Golden Age of World Cinema - Renoir, Ozu, Ray, DeSica, Bergman and others of similarly gilded eminence to the World of Great Art. Except perhaps for Altman and Bogdanovich, no director from America's Golden Age mined the problems of real people so deeply.  

But maybe great art needs that potboiler aspect to it. We are as much dust as divinity, and without the ability to be entertained, who will pay attention? Even I can admit that Mad Men had its dull, even wooden moments that didn't ring true at all. Perfection is an enclosed space from which by definition, you can't reach higher than its limitations. But when the White Walkers come spilling into Hardhome like latter day devils making their first inroads into Elysium, when Ned Stark is senselessly beheaded in front of his family, when Daenerys Targaryen emerges alive like a goddess from the fire - completely nude with baby dragons on her shoulders, when a condemned Tyrion Lannister curses the entire audience of the showtrial his father convened to have him killed, when Oberyn Martell's head smashes like a falling melon, when half the remaining Starks are butchered when they finally recover from the loss of their patriarch, when Stannis Baratheon - TV's Macbeth, or King Saul - literally sacrifices his daughter to fire as a last desperate attempt to fulfill his ambition, you realize that you're dealing with a different, wholly more potent and terrible, kind of sublimity. Mad Men merely hints at this horrific, warnographic sublimity in its 2nd to last episode when an Oklahoma WWII veteran alludes to his brief dalliance with cannibalism on the Western Front. Game of Thrones stands, perhaps lesserly, but still very much present, in the tradition of Beethoven, Michelangelo, older Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Orson Welles. It grasps at the infinite, and goes higher and further into the sublime than Mad Men ever could. It's strong evidence, like Dostoevsky and Shakespeare at his worst, that only works that sink so low can rise so high. No amount of absurd, bad, or trashy scenes can take away the horrific and disgusting greatness Game of Thrones has achieved. 

Mad Men vs. Game of Thrones (Part 1 of) Part II

There was a few weeks when I thought I'd made my peace with Game of Thrones. No matter how much sadism is served to us, no matter how many rapes, how much torture, how many grisly ways to mutilate bodies, how much undeserved death, it is still true to itself, and true to what we as the audience require from it. Here is a TV show, a work of art, of operatic, epic, Shakespearean, near-Biblical ambition; with more characters, more plotting, more set pieces, more sheer scope, than anything ever seen on a screen, either large or small; served to us in brilliantly disturbing bits, but with a surfeit of wit and panache to help us through the grimmest of passages. Last week, the White Walkers appeared, in a battle scene (or a massacre) whose filmmaking stands with the most extraordinary passages in Spielberg.

Then Stannis Baratheon sacrificed his daughter to the Lord of Light by burning her on a pyre, and we the audience are compelled to listen to this sweet little girl, more intelligent than anyone around her and who never got anything but suffering from this show, as she screams in agony while her mother is held back by soldiers after she tries to rescue her. There has never yet been horror quite like this so graphically rendered on a screen. And make no mistake, this is horror rendered as it is. It's the kind that haunts our nightmares for years because we're made to care about these characters in a way that slasher movies throwing fake blood at a camera never could. With slasher movies, taking their cue as they do from Alfred Hitchcock, there is almost always a wink that tells us this is all in good fun - you can disengage from your nightmares being exploited at any moment. But Game of Thrones never gives us that wink. We're carried along, horror after horror, with our critical faculties long since obliterated. The sensory assault continues week after week, battering us into craving ever greater levels of gruesomeness. What horror can possibly be in store after this?

I predicted that this would happen weeks ago, my mother can attest to it. And yet I honestly thought they would spare us the horror, just this once, because it's just too horrible. Perhaps she'd be led into a room with Melisandre, and it would tastefully happen offscreen. But no, it happens in real time, in front of a cast of thousands. Fortunately, we're spared watching the burning girl, but we hear everything, and short of actually seeing something like that, what could possibly be more horrifying?

Game of Thrones is in a terrible bind. In order to keep us watching, they have to create ever more horrifying levels of violence. Yes, war is war, today as much as in the Middle Ages, and people far more real than anybody on Game of Thrones get raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered; but to show it so often makes violence the entire point of the show. At this point, Game of Thrones belongs to that unholy class of art that's both great art and horrific exploitation. 

Yes, I can hear the protests of the half-dozen of you who've read this far. It's the same protest my mother pointed out to me. There are so many other things in Game of Thrones - complex characters portrayed by great actors, amazing filmmaking of stupefyingly complex plots, and intrigue on a level The Wire can only dream of. But that's ultimately the problem with the fantasy genre. It can literally do anything, and because it can, it must do everything in order to be compelling. Reality may have moved past magic and medieval superstition, but our minds have not. Our psyches still boil with reptile fascination for the ability to destroy, and the more we gaze into the that power to destroy, the more likely society is to embrace destruction.  

Art is a societal seismograph, and when millions of people are reading and watching scenes of horrific violence, with every taboo broken of what society once held sacred, history stands to reason that horrific violence is none too far away. Like the Ring Cycle before it, like The Brothers Karamazov, like even Candide, Game of Thrones exists in the world of the psyche and its archetypes. It speaks to its society because it gives voice to all the unmentionables that are already in the air. 

Westeros is America. The phenomenon of Game of Thrones was created by a country with 350 million privately held guns, with nearly 20 trillion dollars in government debt and nearly another 40 trillion in personal debt (household, small business, unfunded liabilities) , with temperatures and sea levels rising (summer is coming...), thousands of nuclear weapons not protected, 1 in 10-20 people controlling half the country's wealth, and a threat from a country known for its dragons just beyond the horizon. Game of Thrones speaks, very loudly, to the unmentionable, almost unconscious, fears of what lies in a future all too close at hand. Some works of art exist to console us, others exist to drive us mad. 

The world has always relied on fantasy to give us the most stupendous bursts of sublimity. Religion is impossible without fantasy literature, so is all the human progress that comes in the wake of epic tales that awoke parts of our imagination we never knew existed. How many worlds of thought were opened by the Bible? By Homer? By Shakespeare? All of them traffic in a mental world where even the most miraculous things are possible. But the sublimity that makes them possible also drives men crazy with the idea that all things are possible so long as we make them happen. 

There is not a shred of verifiable evidence to show that art makes us better people, but it is a mark of civilization that we can recognize our baser selves through art, but great art puts us in touch with the fundamental truths of what lies within our natures, almost like a 'warning and reassurance' system to our psyches as to what we're capable of. We shouldn't necessarily like what we see, and we shouldn't necessarily believe what great art tells us - nowhere moreso these days than on Game of Thrones. 

Game of Thrones was an inevitable show. If it weren't Game of Thrones which shows us the deep darkness of human nature, it might have been a still more violent show. But while we grew incredibly accustomed to violence long before Game of Thrones appeared, it's beyond debate that Game of Thrones has desensitized us to the idea of that those we are close to will be murdered.

800 Words: In Praise of Betty Draper

The Golden Age of TV was not kind to women. We hate ourselves for loving Tony Soprano, Walter White, Jimmy McNulty, Don Draper, and yet, to a man, we love to hate their spouses.

No spouse was more hated than Skyler White, and the actress who played her: Anna Gunn, was rewarded for how faithfully she executed Vince Gilligan's requests to be the shrewish counterpart to Walter's evil with death threats. But at least Breaking Bad granted Skyler her own personhood. Betty Draper/Francis spent Mad Men longing for a liberation from her husbands Don and Henry. In Breaking Bad, it was Walter who longed for liberation, and Breaking Bad granted him more liberation than Walter could ever imagine. But the whole point of Betty's character was that her liberation would never happen. To their dying days, women like Betty Draper are  designed to stuff their humanity into a two-dimensional beauty that is clearly less than human casing.

Nobody ever likes Betty Draper - whatever small bits of personality she exhibited was as shockingly unattractive as the figure from which it issued was beautiful. It is a mirror opposite of Shakespeare's Richard III, whose ugliness has turned his soul ugly. Betty's beauty has, in a sense, wilted her soul. She is personally unattractive because being disliked is the only way that her human qualities could even be noticed.

I vividly remember a G-chat status by a friend of mine - a guy of course - who was a few seasons behind on Mad Men from me. He wrote in all caps: "BETTY DRAPER IS HITLER!!!" I knew exactly which episode of Season 2 he'd just watched. But assuming Betty Draper is Hitler assumes that she has personality enough to have an unattractive personality. Unlike the male fantasies which exist in so many works of art, not merely a person, like Vertigo's Judy Barton, she is barely more than a chimera, a person designed to capture men's imaginations. But, if anything, Matthew Weiner's rendering if this beauty myth is at very least a degree more artful than Hitchcock's. Whereas Judy Barton (or Madeleine Ferguson) is coached to ensnare men to so that a movie plot can be set into motion, Betty Draper is coached by an invisible society of time and place which only exists in our imaginations and the social mores of people who soon will be deceased.

Rewatching the early episodes of Mad Men is always instructive when you realize just how important Betty Draper used to be in the show, and equally instructive when you realize that January Jones's acting has been grotesquely maligned. No one will confuse January Jones for a master thespian, but no one was confusing Kim Novak or Janet Leigh either. These were movie stars, not actresses, who had a very specific part to play and were cast at least as much for how they looked on camera as how they acted. The only difference between Betty Draper and Marion Crane was that in the intervening half-century between their creations, the plight of women like them gained sympathy, and therefore a voice.

But did Marilyn Monroe ever seem more at ease with her onscreen role? Did your elderly but well dressed female cousin who got a divorce in the days when divorce was a scandal? Betty Draper is, in many ways, the truest to life, fully realized, character in the entire Mad Men universe because there is so little life to realize in her. She is barely human because that is all she is allowed from her life. And when the show ends, she will disappear into memory, as so many women have, because the memories of men is all to which they were allowed to appeal.

800 Words: Game of Thrones - The New TV

SPOILER ALERT - OF COURSE

Last night, Mad Men premiered its last season and nobody notices, they were too busy recovering from King Joffery’s poisoning at his own wedding. One show prides itself on belaying audience expectations, going at its own pace, and giving the audience what it needs rather than what it wants. The other show plays to our basest, most primal bloodlust. One show presents humanity in all its slow-burning existential messiness, the other is a freak show.

King Joffery’s death wasn’t even the most disturbing moment in the episode, it wasn’t even the second-most. The second-most disturbing was to watch a beautiful girl chased through a forest like a hunted fox by nobles until the nobles ordered her torn apart by their wild dogs. But at least the actual tearing apart was off-screen, even if we had to listen to her choked screams. The most disturbing was to watch King Stannis order the burning of his wife’s brother at the stake, and by this point, Stannis’s wife is such a religious nut that she’s happy about it. She claims she saw the Lord of Light claim his soul after the fire cleansed it. I’ve occasionally had nightmares about medieval torture since I was a child, and that moment shook me so profoundly that I’m actively contemplating giving up the show - it’s not the first time such a moment caused me to.

Nevertheless, I love watching Game of Thrones. I also love watching youtube clips of idiots jumping into cactus patches. We all have a part of ourselves - the Id - that wants to trivialize other human beings, that wants to treat others as our playthings, that makes us feel triumphant in our relative security to the savagery brought upon people in inferior positions to ours. We may superficially mourn the loss of the Starks, but our primary emotion at their demise is excitement and delight - delight at an exhibition that alleviates us of civilization’s veneer and excites us with its barbarism. Game of Thrones conjures a world of medieval inhumanity, and is a spiritual descendent of the Auto-da-fe, during which medieval humans laughed and cheered uproariously as they picniced to the soothing screams of heretics burned and disemboweled - heretics who may well have been their neighbors. We want to think our sensibility more evolved, but we’re a mere few centuries away. The reptile part of the brain is still with us, and for all our civilization, all it takes is to watch Joffery Baratheon turn purple to momentarily turn us into Joffery Baratheon.

In the history of Television, there is not a single show, not Seinfeld, not South Park, not The Sopranos, not Breaking Bad, that has shaken the world to the extent Game of Thrones has. Each of those shows felt utterly shocking in their heyday, but none of them seem to shock people in the manner which Game of Thrones does. Every episode is an event, because people can’t wait to find out to what new inhuman depth the show will bring us.

It has long been the privilege of costume drama, of legend, of fantasy and myth, to act out those situations which would seem completely unbelievable in reality. In dreams, many people may well perpetrate all those acts of violence and lust which we see on a show like Game of Thrones, but thankfully few could ever do in reality until a war happens. What Game of Thrones does, what Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby do, what Titus Andronicus and Richard III do, what Salome and The Ring Cycle do, what Breughel’s Triumph of Death and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights do, is to bring us closer to those horrible instincts which fester in the unconscious of every human. It is not the thinker or empath within us which loves such work, it is the Id, that Freudian sadist in every one of us which delights in seeing the suffering of others without fear of reprisal; and equally, it’s our anxious superegos, momentarily relieved that it can let down its guard because we no longer have to worry about breaking certain taboos. In reality, murder is rarely if ever funny, but in certain fictions, murder can be hilarious, it can be exciting, it can be delightful.

It was sometimes said about Alfred Hitchcock that he shot scenes of love as though they were scenes of murder, and scenes of murder as though they were scenes of love. This, more than any other reason, is why Alfred Hitchcock is still the most influential movie director of all time - many would even call him the greatest. After Hitch, there was no going back; movies were no longer about anything but voyeurism. The most salient quality of most great movies was to show you disturbing things that dared you to look away. For all its strengths in storyboarding, acting, production design, Game of Thrones is not worthy of Hitchcock. It does not display anything like the wit or character inwardness or philosophical profundity present in Rear Window, or Psycho, or The Birds, but it is a spiritual descendent of Hitch nevertheless because it shares his most influential quality. With Game of Thrones, television has now gone over the cliff to that exact same place. Will it eventually be remembered with all the veneration we now give to Hitchcock? I sure hope not, it would say something terrible about human beings. But it’s certainly possible.

And because Game of Thrones has brought TV to that new place where our every desire is met, TV itself has entered a new age. The years 1967 to 1983 - Bonnie and Clyde to The Right Stuff - were a sixteen-year golden age for movies when Hollywood cared about Art as much as Money. Movie directors were not merely artisans who created products to order, they were artists whose creativity was limited only by their imaginations. But the Star Wars Trilogy killed all that, because studios saw that by putting the focus on special effects rather than human beings, they could take in much more at the box office. Young men interested in technology would see movies over and over again, beleaguered adults interested in escapist fare rather than challenging work would wander in, knowing that they could turn their brains off; and they could bring their children too, secure in the knowledge that the children wouldn’t be exposed to anything too offensive.  

In the same way, the end of Mad Men in 2015 may mark the end of a golden era of American Television that began sixteen years before with the launch of The Sopranos. During these sixteen years, the showrunner was king, and the talented among them were free to pursue their art to the fullest extent of their potentials. For my entire adult life thus far, TV has been the most exciting thing in the world - an artform awakening to its fullest infinity. To see Mad Men or Seinfeld or The Simpsons or when they first air is a pleasure not altogether different from being present at the Globe to see Hamlet and King Lear. In every other artform, movies included, the revelations of what’s possible have mostly been revealed. Nearly every movie, novel, play, painting, sculpture, poem, and song is a footnote to work already created. But the history of TV is still being written, or at least it was until Game of Thrones.  We know that we’re the first people ever to experience revelations which no audience before us has ever experienced. Is there any greater privilege of being alive in the era we are?

Game of Thrones is a beginning. Good as it is, it is probably the beginning of TV’s decline in an internet age. Netflix, the corporate halfway house between television and the internet, is the most seismic shift in American culture since Ted Turner started distributing Basic Cable in 1976. A year later, Star Wars was released, and a trip to the movie theater became a special event rather than a way of life. The American Way of Life became television. But Game of Thrones has made us so accustomed to adrenaline and immediate gratification that it changed American TV into something like movies. Just as Star Wars was the first movie whose merchandising tie-ins were mass-marketed on television, Game of Thrones was the first show to gain its popularity through viewer feedback on the Internet. Game of Thrones is such a success because it gives its viewers what they want, unconsciously or consciously. The gratification on Game of Thrones is visceral and instant in a manner no show before it ever was. If a show wants to be successful in its wake, it will have to respond to its audience’s demands in more basic ways than even Game of Thrones ever needed to. On-demand viewing allows shows to be watched whenever people want, and however often people want. If a show makes demands on the audience, they can simply watch something less challenging. Every niche will have shows which cater exclusively to them, and television will very quickly become a less interesting place.

800 Words: The End of the Late Night Wars

I was with a British friend at a baseball game the other day. We were discussing the rumors of Letterman’s imminent retirement, and he told me that he never got why Letterman was so iconic. It’s tough to explain why a man like Dave would be iconic to someone who wasn’t around for his prime (or whose parents weren’t) because David Letterman did more to shape everything we know about American TV than any man of his generation.

It’s very easy to dismiss Dave in an era when every TV show competes with the latest youtube sensation for the funniest random shit. But in the 80’s and 90’s, when mainstream American culture was so bought and paid for by corporations, it was a sheer stroke of luck that landed a man as weird as David Letterman on television.

The secret of Letterman’s early success was all too simple: do the show you want to do, because nobody’s watching. He had nothing to lose, so he became the American mainstream’s bridge to It’s counterculture. It wasn’t just the inspired randomness of putting stupid pet tricks on, or the Top Ten Lists that got old thirty years ago, or throwing large objects out of the 30th floor window in Rockefeller Center, or dressing up in suits made of Velcro or Alka-Seltzer, or using funny-looking old people like Bud Mehlman and Leonard Tepper in humiliating ways. It was also that he practically launched the mainstream careers of REM, Talking Heads, Warren Zevon, Chris Rock, and Jon Stewart. It was that he brought on ‘favorite’ guests like Charles Grodin and Richard Simmons for the particular reason that he clearly couldn’t stand them and they couldn’t stand him. It was that he would have Siskel and Ebert run out into the theater mid-summer with a wheelbarrow of snowballs to throw at the audience. It was that he would have Paul Newman stand up from the audience and announce that he thought he was going to a production of Cats. It was that when he thought a guest was a particular waste of space - think Crispin Glover, Joachim Phoenix, Justin Bieber, Donald Trump, Lindsey Lohan, Courtney Love, Lady Gaga, Farrah Fawcett, Drew Barrymore, Madonna, - he let them know in front of millions of people that they were idiots, and it wasn’t just celebrity lightweights either. Neither Bill O’Reilly nor Rod Blagojevich nor John McCain came out looking good after sparring with Letterman. In fact, every person grateful for a Barack Obama presidency owes a huge debt of gratitude to Letterman. The night after the economic downturn in September was the same night that John McCain begged off the Letterman show so he could rush back to Washington, only for Letterman to capture footage of him on camera in the CBS news studio. It was, definitively, the moment America decided that John McCain was too incompetent to run this country.

Jay Leno might have commanded America, but Letterman commanded ‘The American Carnival.’ After Ed Sullivan, the non-stop parade of American entertainment didn’t go to Johnny Carson - whose guests would have to pass a prestige test for the country’s consumption. Johnny’s persona was based in no small part on ‘class’. Johnny Carson was a naturally dapper, telegenic, and urbane. For someone like Carson to dress up in a skit as a genie would get a laugh simply because ridiculousness seemed so far removed from a guy like Johnny. But the persona of David Letterman, a man as ugly as Carson was handsome, is based on 'chaos.' Dave looks like a man who knows about chaos, and he basically turned his shows into a vaudeville house in which he was the MC. He simply took in everything he could find, made a beef stew out of it, and stood out of its way. Before Dave, television was supposed to be scripted, canned, predictable. But Dave let a wrestler hit Andy Kauffman onstage, he publically berated Harvey Pekar, he did sixteen interviews with Brother Theodore - a “Standup Tragedian,” he got Sonny and Cher (who called Dave an 'asshole') to sing together for the first time in twenty years. For thirty years, America turned on Dave to see what a weird country we live in.

Letterman was a comic of the 70s, released on the world in the wake of George Carlin and Richard Pryor, which meant that he made his bones doing standup gigs in places far seedier than today’s comics ever have to venture. If you compared the seediness of that era’s punk venues against their comedy clubs, it’s no fair bet that the punks would win. The venues in which comics had to work were disgusting, drug ridden, and often violent. It also endowed the comics of his time with an almost mythic street cred. Who could possibly know what joke might piss off a psycho or gangster? Purely from a comedy point of view, there was no better time to be a comic. But Leno and Letterman rose up from those circumstances because they were fundamentally unsuited for those lives - they were clearly more clean-cut, less vulgar, less drug-dependent, than most of their colleagues (who were probably funnier). It’s easy to imagine Jay Leno as loathing every minute of it and dreaming of the day he could get something better, but it’s equally easy to imagine Dave relishing the chance to go up against an audience who might be offended by him. Letterman has a personality so dominating that he can tell anyone exactly what he thinks and get away with it.

No matter how big his show got, he never got dizzy in high places. Dave had the one quality that Jay Leno never did - he was permanently unimpressed. Jay always seemed giddy with excitement that he’d reached the top of the show business ladder. Dave could almost seem to care less - most nights he seemed just aggravated or bored - and he made sure we all knew. Every night for thirty years, he has done precisely the show he’s wanted to do. If he wants to send the Bangladeshis who own the camera shop across the street on a tour of America, he gets to do that. If he wants his stage manager to visit every town in America named Bisby, that’s what he gets. If he wants his mother to cover the Winter Olympics so she can petition Hilary Clinton to absolve Dave’s parking tickets, that’s what he gets. Letterman’s persona is grounded in the fact that a weird dude finds this funny, and because this weird dude does, we do too.

Jay worked his way up from a Boston blue collar background to become America’s late-night king. To Jay, success is about ‘making it’, and he would never consciously do anything to disappoint the bosses or audiences which allowed his ascent. He worked so hard to rise up that he became his job, and seemed to have no personality outside of his show’s routines. I don’t doubt that Dave worked nearly as hard to get to where he was, but Dave was a squarely middle class, Middle America kid who even in his 60’s seems like he just pulled a giant prank. He didn’t seem to care whether or not he was a success in show business, all he cared about was the fun he’d have along the way.

And because Dave seems so secure within himself, he is able to do things no other comic of his time would ever be able to. Everyone remembers Dave as the first TV host to go back on the air after 9/11. It was a gravely serious show, during which he spoke for every American’s bewilderment and held the hand of Dan Rather as Rather broke down in tears. Imagine Jay Leno having that much security within himself, hell, imagine Johnny Carson working up the sincerity to do it. But we should also remember Dave as the guy who spoke up in public about his extra-marital affair after he was blackmailed. The admission was so casual, as though he was talking about what he had for lunch, that we wonder how anybody could ever think Dave could be blackmailed. We accepted both equally from Dave, because he was Dave, and there wasn’t a single emotion he’d ever hold back.

‘Weird’ has so much currency in today’s culture that it’s lost its cache. In a world where computer geeks make more money than anyone else, and American culture is made from a tapestry of niches, the whole country seems to be based around Dave’s view of it. Dave may never have gotten the Tonight Show, but if the Late Night Wars were truly a war, then Dave won it handily. Every major talk show host of the next generation - Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Joel McHale, Chelsea Handler, Craig Kilborn, Craig Ferguson - is a variation on the model of Letterman. The exception to this rule is Jimmy Fallon, who, like Leno, is a throwback to the Carson model of charming the audience rather than assaulting them, and such is charm's expendability that NBC simply threw Leno out for a newer model of himself.

But there is now a new model of talk show host which has broken free of the Letterman influence by building on it. Jon Stewart may have started out as a Letterman protege, but his proximity to the source allowed him to build upon Letterman’s model. Stewart takes Letterman’s relish of this country’s weirdness and uses it to put a magnifying glass onto American politics and culture, a model that Stephen Colbert has built upon (please don’t replace Dave Stephen). Just as Letterman’s chaos was the next logical step from Carson’s control, Stewart’s critiques are the next logical step from Letterman’s chaos.  

But what’s ironic is that Jon Stewart didn’t seek out a new pattern. He simply wanted to be David Letterman, just as David Letterman wanted to be Johnny Carson, and just as Johnny Carson wanted to be Jack Benny. One day soon there will be a great comedian who wants to be Jon Stewart, and he will come up with an even newer model of how to run a talk show.

800 Words: When the Fans Are More Interesting Than The Show

I.

Somewhere between art and entertainment, there is that murky border region where vast popular success resides - a place where entertainment is so good that it’s too good to simply be entertainment, but not good enough to be genuine art. It’s that sweet spot where the masses feel elevated by something that speaks to them more powerfully than any amount of elite art, but in order to speak to the masses, it has to make terrible compromises to touch them which the more genuine article needn’t do. The Harry Potter books are nowhere near as good as its advocates allege (one or two were genuinely bad), but no closer to being as bad as AS Byatt or Harold Bloom said they were. The (original) Star Wars trilogy was made of three fine movies, but two of them were deeply flawed, and they took the entire movie industry’s focus off of human beings and onto special effects. Many Spielberg movies can be said to reside in that same neither region, so can nearly all the best American music of the 20th century (more on that another time…), so can most of the great movies of Classic Hollywood, so can Rodgers and Hammerstein, so can Verdi and Puccini, so can Dickens and Balzac. Everything listed here is great work by great creators, but it’s impossible not to look at it and see the faultlines, the imperfections, the concessions to what was expected of them that kept the work earthbound even as it inspires us.

In many ways, such works are more illuminating than the total successes. To give one obvious example - I believe, very firmly, that we live in the ‘Era of Mad Men.’ Unless this final season screws it up, it is the greatest, most powerful work of art being made today (that I know of) in any genre and any place. But it’s so inestimably great that it almost defies comment - how can we define such a powerful work of art when the artwork does so much more to define us? It took me  a single post to say just about everything I’ve wanted to say about Mad Men. I’ve been asked by a few people to write more about the show, but I have no idea how to add to what I’ve already written. On the other hand, it took me four posts (and counting) to write about Aaron Sorkin’s shows, their frustrations and failures, their generation of hopeful expectation for something truly great which always dies a horrible death. It’s one of the unfortunate downsides of criticism that failure is more interesting than success. There are only so many ways you can elucidate why something is great, because greatness speaks for itself. But the number of ways you can describe why something failed is endless.

So let’s give all due praise to these not-quite-masterpieces; these high-level failures which continually grasp for the eternal but settle for sugarcoated lies. They may not tell eternal truths about the world, but they tell us more about the people who love them than a series like Mad Men ever could. They show us our weaknesses because we love them for theirs. Harry Potter was the perfect work for its generation, a generation raised to believe that it was chosen to be better, more educated, more virtuous, than preceding generations, only to be imprisoned by a world of shrinking opportunities - waiting beneath the stairs for an owl that may never come. Star Wars was the perfect work for the generation before - a generation so privileged to believe that they’ve discovered a force no one before them had, which will bind the world together in perfect harmony, and all that prevents them from doing so is an evil imperial power.

II.

It seems quite far-fetched to most people to call How I Met Your Mother a nearly-eternal artwork, myself included. But it certainly has that grasp-exceeding reach for the stars which is a hallmark of such works. No one would claim that it has the epoch-setting reach of Harry Potter, but it did have an extremely significant impact on the Harry Potter generation. My parents’ contemporaries had barely heard of the show, but the majority of my contemporaries watched it, and clearly the show had something which spoke very deeply to my generation.

As I expected, the ending was a downer, and it pissed off most of the show’s fans. I was rather ambivalent to the ending - I admired it without liking it, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d been manipulated without justification. It’s better than a fairy tale ending, but the opposite of a fairy tale is still just a dark fairy tale.

How I Met Your Mother was not a show about happy people, but it was a show about optimistic people. In an era of reduced expectations, its fans were so passionate because the show assured them that their dreams may still come to life. One day, the show seems to assure us, Ted’s suffering will pay off. He will be New York’s pre-eminent architect, united in boundless love with ‘The One’, and they’ll have wonderful children who indulge him as he tells a nine-year-long story. The whole premise is clearly ridiculous, and yet we eat it up, because every person who rises in the morning to fulfill a dream needs such fodder to believe those dreams may yet come true.

And come true they did for Ted, only for his dreams to shatter at the last minute and leave us with the awful (and probable) truth that our dreams too will probably be shattered.  In that sense, the finale isn’t just unpleasant, it’s a monstrous betrayal of trust. After assuring us for nine years that it’s alright to believe that our lives will get better, HIMYM uses only its final moments to finally tell us the truth - that our lives will probably get worse; that the true suffering is yet to come, and is so unbearable that no one should be subjected to anything but the smallest mention of it. And since our lives will eventually be unendurable, we should be grateful that we could live with our illusions for as long as we have.,

(Dan and Rosanne, TV’s greatest love story. If you’re going to get real, get real. h/t Der Fersko)

I will go to bat for HIMYM against anyone who calls it just another assembly-line shitcom. But it is, nevertheless, a show in the second rank. It only embraced life as it really is at the last minute, when only a true sadist would tell the truth. Until then, it did nothing but feed us lies that we all hope against hope are true.

800 Words: How to End a TV Show

Read no further if you want to preserve the mystery of How I Met Your Mother ends, but if, like me, you suspected the odds of a downer ending were nearly 1-to-1, you can’t help but admire the balls it takes to do it, even if you still view it as a terrible copout. True to form, this mainstream sitcom grinded millions of noses in the shit of what life really is - even if it can’t help but shout at the top of its lungs that that’s where it’s grinding your nose. How I Met Your Mother is, from beginning to end, the greatest shitcom ever made. But it’s still a shitcom.

HIMYM wanted it both ways, it wanted to be a fairy tale about how a romantic finally met the perfect woman after a decade’s agonized search, yet it also wanted to be true to real life and show that life is full of suffering, awkwardness, and boredom. It’s truly astounding how well it managed to stride those two worlds, and perhaps a more sympathetic viewer than I would say that it’s not a problem. But it’s a problem.

The mother was never, for even a moment, a real character. She was an apparition, a tantalizingly conjured dream of a dream woman with no wishes and needs of her own - kept off the screen for every possible moment to preserve her perfection in Ted’s (and our) eyes, kept mostly chaste in her backstory while Ted ran around with 40 other women, showed only enough times we can see so that her only role on the show is to be Ted’s destiny, then killed off before we could gain any insight into whom she truly was. If their goal was to create a dream woman, they succeeded brilliantly. Of course, if we saw the mother in three-dimensions, she would disappoint us all. But that’s precisely what we needed - we needed to see a relationship with disappointments, leading to a marriage with disappointments, with children who disappoint them both, leading to a decision of whether or not to preserve the marriage in spite of the disappointments. Half of every human relationship is defined by how we disappoint each other (probably much more...), and true disappointment is what How I Met Your Mother always evaded. There was always another huge romantic gesture to cover up life's brutality, and no allowance that most people’s lives contain more agony than joy. Their evasions were astoundingly skillful, and even now, our picture of the Mother fits like a perfect piece to a jigsaw puzzle. Nobody can say that HIMYM avoids life’s disappointments after this series finale, but it's all far too neat. The resolution of this show is no more than a jigsaw puzzle version of how life really is that’s meant to appease both the rom-com audience and the critical one. Sure, Ted experiences terrible agony and unfairness, and Marshall and Lilly have unresolved issues in their marriage which will pull it downhill, but their real suffering is in the future, off-screen and after the series ends.

Otherwise, it was a pretty good finale - admitting what we all knew, that Barney couldn’t stop being a lothario and Robin would pine after Ted, that these friendships could not possibly last for any longer than they already did, that Marshall and Lily would have to clean up after everybody else’s messes, but also that these people were family, and nothing could keep them apart for life’s greatest and worst moments. But if HIMYM were really true to life, Ted and Robin would never have another opportunity to get together. It it would be the unfortunate 'what if' of both their disappointing lives. Ted would have met Tracy give years earlier, and we'd see their relationshp play out. They would be the ones tempted to divorce, and it would be Barney who’d meet an unfortunate end as so many people who live too hard do too early. Maybe Barney was still shacking up with bimbos and fooling Robin into thinking he was a faithful husband, perhaps he got drunk and had a heart attack during sex with a stripper, or crashed his car into the East River and drowned both himself and Robin's intern while his pants were down. But ‘lifeness’ was never HIMYM’s goal, their goal was to give us just enough realism to let us escape from reality.

A TV finale is a declaration of principles. In movies or plays, the ending is a third of the artwork itself - the conflict is raised, wrestled with, then resolved. But TV, like novels, must have a resolution which is true to the spirit of the show, and while a series finale can disappoint (I’m looking at you Larry David), it can’t help but shed light on what this long story was about. We already know the characters, we already know the story, all that’s left to do is to sum up why we undertook this journey. Seinfeld’s finale was famously reviled, but it was utterly true to the show - as devastatingly nihilistic and antisocial as the entire series was. Opinion on The Sopranos’ finale was divided, but like the show itself, it was meant as a challenge, meant to make us think on a level which no TV show had ever before done. Breaking Bad’s finale (yes, I watched out of sequence and ahead…) was an almost universally applauded realistic end that could also be interpreted as the final flashes of imagination within a man who freezes to death - summing up a show that worked both an exciting pot boiler and a brain teaser. Some finales, like Six Feet Under, are more well-praised than the show itself, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a show about death would be extremely well-prepared to have a great ending. But to me, the greatest TV finale I’ve ever seen was to Big Love, a flawed but vastly underrated show to the very end, in which the series finale seemed to demonstrate that the show’s point was to document the founding of an entire religion, and not a single TV critic noticed...

Nobody is ever going to be completely satisfied with the ending of a great TV show or book, and you can find thousands of Amazon reviews from readers who complain that ‘the ending of this novel was arbitrary.’ To a huge extent, a great play or movie is its ending - we only know its characters for long enough for us to define them by what happens to them. But a great novel or TV show can still have a terrible ending and be a great work of art, because we live and breathe with these characters for as much time as we spend with our friends and family. Life can be disappointing, and so can the ways we part with our favorite characters within them, so why can’t TV shows have disappointing finales too?

800 Words: How We Met The Mother

This week, most TV bloggers want to write about Breaking Bad, but I don’t feel comfortable writing about that show. My relationship to it began this summer when I binge watched the first four seasons. I haven’t watched a moment of it since, and while I haven’t been totally successful, I’ve done what I could to avoid any fifth-season spoilers. So instead, I want to talk about a show that is just as important to the zeitgeist that will join Breaking Bad soon in TV afterlife.

One of my favorite episodes of How I Met Your Mother was made just last season, a rare admission from a fan of a show which everybody agrees has gone downhill in recent years. In this episode, the characters sit down to watch the Star Wars Trilogy in a single day, something they do every three years. The narrative of this episode is so sophisticated that we get flashbacks and flash-forwards to past and future viewings of the Star Wars Trilogy, and we also get flash forwards from every flashback to the characters’ expectations of what the next three years will bring. When I saw this episode, I was kind of speechless. LOST had done many similar things, but unlike LOST, this episode was completely coherent, and utterly without any of LOST’s heavy-handedness.

Like Star Wars, How I Met Your Mother is almost more interesting because of its fans’ reactions than because of the work itself. I have no idea if anyone over the age of 40 watches the show, and I rather doubt it. But in this era when there are thousands of TV options, it’s the one show which nearly everyone in my generation has watched. Its a show which is clearly influenced by the highest-brow great art imaginable, and yet it’s still completely accessible to the largest possible public. It's a Mary Tyler Moore-type show for the Seth MacFarlane generation, and it just might be the greatest ‘bad sitcom’ ever made.

Perhaps I’m biased. I graduated college just a few months before How I Met Your Mother premiered. But I can’t help seeing this show as the perfect show for the Millennial generation - its characters growing into reduced expectations at the same rate that its viewers are doing so. Ted, Marshall, and Lilly were all born around 1978. This means they would have matriculated at Wesleyan in 1996, and graduated in 2000. Ted and Marshall would have been fresh New Yorkers when the Twin Towers fell and by the time we meet them, they’ve became seasoned Gothamites during the first period in a century when New York was ‘just another huge city.’ They already knew disappointment when the show began, but the disappointments only grew.

It’s worth noting that the show first aired less than a month after Hurricane Katrina (think of how important a Hurricane is to the plot of the show…). The show followed us into The Great Recession, the Tea Party’s emergence, and Obama disillusionment - not at all literally, but the gloom of these years can’t help but have influenced the show’s pallete. It was the perfect show for its time because Ted Mosby was wondering if life would ever grant him his fondest wish at the exact same time that most Americans his age were wondering the same. For millions, literally millions, of young Americans, How I Met Your Mother was the show they turned on every week to assure themselves that it’s OK to still believe that life will turn out the way they want it to.

I watched the last episode of Season 8 a day late, when pictures of the ‘Mother’ were plastered all around the internet. Perhaps the shock which RomCom America felt at seeing the mother was muted for me. In any event, I figured it was inevitable that we’d get a glimpse of her going into the last season. We’ve been delayed the meeting of the titular character for eight years, had it been delayed any longer, the world’s sorority population would have rioted. Somehow, a first sight of the mother in the final scene of the show, while all too fitting, would have felt so anti-climactic to the show’s fans that it would be an even larger disappointment to many fans than The Sopranos going black, or Seinfeld sent to jail.

For me, the shock of meeting the ‘Mother’ only came in the last ten minutes of an hour-long episode, when we see Ted and the ‘Mother’ together for the first time - in flash forward. At one moment, the ‘Mother’ looks in the direction ‘present’ Ted, who’s heart-shattered and forlorn, as though she’s trying to imagine the despondency he felt a year before. Too often, I find myself rolling my eyes during the show’s mushier moments, and I think I’m far from the only one. But this moment felt so haunting, so real, that I must have watched it online nearly ten times over the course of the next day. For all the gooey emotional manipulation of the show, it occasionally does something so devastatingly poignant, and rendered so artfully, that you can’t possibly say that this is just another mediocre sitcom.

(A devastatingly emotional moment which HIMYM truly earned - and a clear homage to Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. Unfortunately, along with a good show comes its fans, further proof you don’t choose your allies…)

How I Met Your Mother, thankfully, was never actually about Ted Mosby’s various romances. Nor is the show actually a comedy - which is equally relieving since there were always much funnier comedies on television. How I Met Your Mother is a romance, and the subject of the show is romance itself. Love is only one among many romances which the show celebrates - it also celebrates the romance of New York, the romance of being young, the romance of bars, the romance of clothes, the romance of lust, the romance of friendship. But more than any other quality, HIMYM has been about the romance of possibility - about that brief moment after college when you’re completely aware of just how large the world is, and completely unaware of just how inadequate you are to the task of experiencing the world, only for the realization of that inadequacy to gradually dawn upon you. For a show about romance, it can be shockingly mean-spirited and glum, and seems to have become glummer with every passing year.

(Ew.)

It’s worth pausing here to clarify, in case it seems likely now, that this is not a blogpost which argues that How I Met Your Mother is some kind of immortal artwork. The show is a two-dimensional Fairy Tale, and like all American Fairy Tales never misses a chance to Disneyfy the messiness of human nature for another shot at showing how wonderful and generous human beings can be. The show is delightful, and sometimes that delight can spoil us with a stroke so diabetic that its sugariness threatens to make you swear off sugary shows for the rest of your life. Far too often, we’ve gotten moments straight out of the playbook of Friends, or Scrubs, or Dawson’s Creek.

But even more troubling is the reason we ultimately know that HIMYM is not quite serious about its emotional manipulation. The show artistically gets away with many of those the cynically heartstring-tugging maneuvers which Friends and Scrubs didn’t because of one quality which neither of those other shows ever exhibited - an amazing, grotesque, savage, and not even concealed hatred of women. If some more knowledgeable TV critic called HIMYM the most misogynist show in TV History, I wouldn’t utter a word of protest (in case you’re wondering, the most feminist show in TV History - it’s The Sopranos, I’m serious, watch it again…). The show is not misogynist because of the obvious reason - Barney Stinson gets his comeuppance in virtually every episode. The misogyny lies with every other major character. Ted remains friends with Barney because on some level, there’s a part of him which clearly believes that women are as worthless and dumb as Barney alleges.

Barney Stinson’s maturation as a character was long overdue. Most viewers became hooked on the show by watching him, but I always thought he was the show’s weakest link. For the first three seasons, his character was so one-note that it got incredibly tiresome. And no one on the show seemed in a position to notice. Every other character was annoyed by him, but nobody took a stand and told him that he was worse than a psychopath, he was a tiresome psychopath. And the reason they didn’t was because none of the other characters were in a position to notice. Ted was too resentful of women and his inability to find the ‘One’ to not consider that Barney might be right. Marshall had no reason to care because he had a near-perfect wife who managed to be sexy, loyal, and self-effacing all at once. Lily is basically a 1950’s housewife transferred to 21st century New York - at least when she isn’t acting like a narcissistic harpy - and Robin is every misogynist’s scotch-soaked tomboy wet dream of a woman who smokes cigars and fires guns in her spare time. The only character who might be in a position to call Barney out for what he was was the ‘mother’, every potential one of whom would probably have set Barney on fire.

None of the characters on the show have ever been memorable as anything but archetypes, and it says legions about its high level of acting from the cast that people have never tired of these characters. If there is a better principle cast in a current comedy, I have yet to see it. In this way, How I Met Your Mother is like Friends, but in no other...

Friends was only a seminal influence on How I Met Your Mother’s exterior - a premise no doubt used for a pitch meeting and nothing more. Friends was like How I Met Your Mother’s douchey and overly successful uncle who sends nice presents but can’t be bothered to show up to your wedding even though you’ve shown up to all three of his (Ross’s). Friends is little more than a focus-tested exercise in taking cheap shots at the sentimental weaknesses of not-particularly-intelligent Generation X’ers. The eponymous friends were incredibly dull characters who occasionally bungled their way into humor that was smarter than they were aiming for (with Seinfeld playing a half-hour after them, how could their playbook not be poached?). Friends possessed little in the way of real complexity, or even qualities that were ever meant to put their principles in a truly unflattering light. The characters on HIMYM,are real people, sometimes really unpleasant people, who unfortunately sometimes act like Hallmark Cards. But the most damning problem with Friends is that like HIMYM, Friends had a great cast. But unlike Friends, HIMYM knew how to use them. Whereas How I Met Your Mother always had new tricks up its sleeve which it could use with a magician’s (Barney’s?) sleight of hand, Friends had the same half-dozen basic comic and romantic situations. No one would accuse How I Met Your Mother of not endlessly trodding the same romantic ground, but there were always new comic situations in HIMYM. And even if the comedy wasn’t as funny as South Park or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, it’s certainly more enjoyable to watch than either.

One of the reasons this show works so well is because it takes a very old school approach to entertainment. How I Met Your Mother is not a comedy of laughs but a comedy of high spirits. What’s important to it is not the laugh lines but the banter itself. It’s very rare that you laugh uproariously at anything on the show, but you consistently enjoy it. In its own ‘bro-ish’ way, HIMYM is High Comedy of the same variety as Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.   

If Friends is HIMYM’s douchey uncle or emotionally abusive grandparent, then the real DNA encoded on HIMYM, like any great show, is comprised of much more diverse and interesting influences. To my mind, the true parents of the show are Arrested Development and Sex and the City. Its grandparents might be said to be Seinfeld, Friends, Frasier, and Ally McBeal. One can go further back in its TV lineage and probably find Cheers, or The Wunder Years, or All in the Family, or M*A*S*H, or Thirtysomething, or Mary Tyler Moore. Close relatives might include Freaks and Geeks, Modern Family, the Joss Wheedon shows (so I’m told…), and obviously all the Seth MacFarlane comedies (the co-creators had a stint writing for American Dad). It might also include certain movies produced by Judd Apatow or written by Charlie Kaufman. You could probably trace its lineage back through Woody Allen movies (obviously) and Nora Ephron (Harry met Sally, and there’s no Barney Stinson without Vinnie Antonelli from My Blue Heaven), John Hughes and Cameron Crowe (Ted Mosby is practically a clone of John Cusack in Say Anything), Frank Capra and Howard Hawks, or novels like Love in the Time of Cholera (a man spends 53 years awaiting his true love’s husband to die and sleeps with thousands of women along the way), The Great Gatsby, and pretty obviously (I mean it) all the way back to 18th century picaresque novels like Tristram Shandy (an autobiography in which the author digresses so much that it ends at the hero’s birth) and Tom Jones, or perhaps even back to Gargantua and Pantagruel (the original novelistic tall tale). Hell, Robin’s last name is Scherbatsky, which is Anna Karenina’s maiden name. I’m not the first person to wonder if the writers didn’t originally intend Ted and Robin’s relationship to be modeled after Anna Karenina’s sister Dolly and Levin’s from the same novel in which Dolly initially spurns Levin only to eventually find herself in something resembling an ideal marriage to him. Which then, of course, begs the question - was Barney originally meant to be Vronsky?

The co-creators of HIMYM, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, worked on a Fox show in the early 2000’s called Oliver Beene, an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful comedy about a family in lower-middle-class Queens during the mid-1960’s. The plot is of course closer to Mad Men, but many of the most important trademarks of HIMYM are there in embryo - the voiceover of a protagonist recalling his youth (incidentally narrated by David Cross) narrating it to us as a long story in which events are remembered out of order with all the narrator’s exaggerations enacted, forgotten details omitted, and tangents which seem to go on forever.

But at the time, the two writers were not their own bosses. They were working under a longtime TV writer named Howard Gewirtz. They were two aspiring writers who met in writing classes at Wesleyan College and then came up together in New York through the world of TV entertainment. In fact, Carter Bays is from Shaker Heights, Ohio - better known as Ted Mosby’s town of origin, while Craig Thomas is from rural Wyoming (it’s not rural Minnesota but I’d imagine they’re similar…) and has been married to a woman he’d been dating since he was a college freshman. When they got their own sitcom, they used Gewirtz’s formula to create precisely the sort of show which two midwestern kids would make if they became English majors at a Northeastern Liberal Arts college. In these fifteen years after Seinfeld, an era when hip sitcoms by big-city natives strive to be ‘about nothing’, How I Met Your Mother came to us with a shockingly old-fashioned dose of Middle-America 'aw shucks(idoodles)' earnestness. But How I Met Your Mother’s writers created one of the most sophisticated and urbane shows ever made, not in spite of the show's earnest belief in emotional connection with the viewers, but because of it.