Alyson Hannigan

I will now give the kiss of death to another show. Seriously, just you wait, I’m going to tell you know how great another show that you’re not watching is and CBS is going to go out tomorrow and cancel the series. But, I don’t care. Well, I do care, I’m just trying to break the (imagined) streak. Enough preamble. Why are you not watching How I Met Your Mother?

No! Enough excuses! You’re not doing anything else nearly as important Mondays at 8 p.m. Don’t give me this ’Deal or No Deal is on at that time.’ You can’t even explain the challenge of that show to me. Do you understand that it takes no skill or knowledge whatsoever, the entire thing is just dumb luck? You pick a frickin’ case and then select random other cases to eliminate. You don’t know what’s in those cases, you just eliminate them. You can’t answer inane trivia questions or trade cases, you just pick random ones. Yeah, that’s great TV. Takes a lot of skill. Flip the dial over to CBS for the first half hour of that show, don’t worry, that mysterious banker fellow will still be around at 8:30, as will the girls with the briefcases. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

How I Met Your Mother is the ingenious story of how the narrator met the mother of his children. Bob Saget narrates as the old Ted (never appearing on screen), and Josh Radnor plays present day Ted. Both Teds are wonderfully funny and the rest of the cast isn’t a bunch of slackers either, with Alyson Hannigan, Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders, and Neil Patrick Harris. Have you met Neil? He’s ridiculously, incredibly, hysterically funny, and forgive me if I repeat myself here, but he was cheated out of an Emmy. CHEATED.

For those of you that get bored by any paragraph longer than two sentences, let me repeat what I just stated. Neil Patrick Harris not only deserved an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, he deserved to win. He was cheated. Not only does he do an outstanding job, but he provides an incredible amount of support. If there is a “breakout” character from How I Met Your Mother, it’s Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris, like you didn’t know that). As with virtually everything these days, How I Met Your Mother has a web component as an added, extra-value element; it’s Barney’s Blog, and much like Barney, it’s awesome.

But, let’s forget Barney for a second, even though that’s not easy to do. Everyone on the show is funny. It actually represents a reasonable facsimile of life for people in their 20s in New York City. The show is clever, well-written, funny, and very human. It’s life, just moderately more amusing.

I’m telling you, take a look, watch the show, and you’ll probably end up saying, “Oh my god, that’s so true” or “Wow, I wish I’d done the same thing when I was in that situation” or “I just had a slap bet last week!” Okay, maybe not that last one, but while the outcomes are never what we would experience, oftentimes the setups are. The funny and outrageous and hysterical is the outcome.

For instance, have you ever gone out on a blind date and realized about 30 seconds in that it was a horrible idea? You look at the person (guy or girl) across from you and think to yourself, “In the name of all that is good and holy what have I gotten myself into now?” Yet, you don’t want to offend the person opposite you, so you slog through dinner, knowing full well that the night is going to end and you’re never going to see the person again, you’re not even having fun. A common occurrence, and one with no escape. Except that the folks over at How I Met Your Mother have invented one, the Lemon Law. Just like with a car that doesn’t work right after you drive it off the lot, the Lemon Law allows you to end the date within five minutes of first sitting down, no harm, no foul. Everyone understands with the Lemon Law that no offense is meant, the relationship simply isn’t mean to be. Poof, you invoke the Lemon Law and the date ends, no one is offended or hurt. Genius. And, when executed correctly in a script (like it is here), funny.

So, there it is dear reader, this week’s admonition. Watch How I Met Your Mother. I get it, I couldn’t convince you Kidnapped was worth your time, after all, that was an hour long show, but How I Met Your Mother is a mere 30 minutes (though you’ll wish it were longer). It’s Monday night, on CBS, at 8:00 p.m. Give it a shot, trust me, you won’t regret it.

Please, I beg of you, I plead with you, I urge you, I hereby do everything in my power to compel you to watch this show, just once. One time.