HIMYM Has Aged Worse Than Friends, and That’s the Hill We Are Dying on
How I Met Your Mother and Friends are two of the funniest sitcoms, but time hasn’t been kind to either of them.
Friends, which ran from 1994 to 2004, still holds up, although some jokes and storylines are questionable. From the almost-incest episode with Ross and Monica’s cousin to Chandler’s anti-trans jokes about his dad, Friends should be taken in with an understanding of the time the show is from.
How I Met Your Mother is a decade younger than Friends, and it is also a product of its time. It’s far from perfect, but for some reason it is not nearly as heavily criticized as Friends. Well, we as longtime fans-possibly-turned-haters say “No more!”, and we come bearing the receipts.
If Friends has the universally hated Ross Geller, How I Met Your Mother has Ted Mosby who is arguably just as bad. He is needy and whiny, he has cheated on his girlfriend, and he has been obsessed with Robin to an unhealthy degree for decades.
Then we have Lily Aldrin, the woman who has manipulated her friends’ love lives, betrayed her fiancé and run off on him, and cannot keep a secret for the life of her. Lily’s one-liners are hilarious, but you wouldn’t be friends with a person like that in real life. Any female character on Friends doesn’t even compare in levels of annoying to Lily.
Joey Tribbiani may be a womanizer, but he’s nowhere as mortifying as Barney Stinson. Sure, Barney is funny, and his (reverted) redemption arc with Robin is the sweetest, but that doesn’t cancel out all his horrible behavior and sexual harassment that his friends have enabled, by the way, for decades.
Robin’s whole can’t-decide-between-Ted-and-Barney schtick has gotten old and frustrating pretty quickly, and on top of that, she is exactly what’s wrong with so-called feminist characters. She claims to be a strong independent woman, but then she uses her femininity and sexuality to get the things she wants with no regrets.
Friends was filmed in the 1990s–2000s and had a lot of problematic storylines, but the majority of its characters still remain relatable. Their everyday struggles are entertaining, and you could watch them and go, “Yeah, that happened to me once.”
The same can’t be said about How I Met Your Mother. It may have been more cleverly written than its predecessor, but the values it upheld were wrong. The characters – however amusing they are – just don’t have the same emotional impact on us a decade later.