… dary.
Here’s something you don’t want to admit about your favorite sitcom: It’s really hard to recommend to your friends. Because while, sure, they believe you that this one slightly–grainy, slightly–dated TV show from 2005 is life–changingly good, they’ve already seen The Office. Or Friends. Or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Your favorite sitcom is important to you because it’s nostalgic and familiar; you know the characters, the inside jokes, where to jump back in when you’ve had a bad day and want an easy laugh. The idea of starting a new show 11 years after it finished airing is intimidating, almost inaccessible.
But if you have a 20–minute break between classes, a Houston burger, and a temporarily low social battery, then I strongly encourage you to watch this episode of How I Met Your Mother.
Carter Bays’s and Craig Thomas’s hit sitcom ran nine seasons from 2005 to 2014 and follows five best friends navigating the work–life–love balance in New York City (there’s a fan theory that each character in HIMYM is a better–written, emotionally deeper version of a Friends counterpart, but I won’t get too deep into the controversial comparisons). Every long–running show will inevitably bear its dips in quality or minor uncompelling arcs, but many fans believe that until its horribly unpopular final three minutes—rivaled maybe only by Game of Thrones for show–destroying endings—HIMYM remained fairly consistent throughout, building long arcs and a lovable ensemble cast and establishing a quirky, uniquely brilliant brand of humor; whether through silly, over–the–top physical comedy, like Marshall (Jason Segel) imagining he’ll get attacked by a bear after his health insurance expires, or bits centered entirely on wordplay, like the iconic club–selecting scene. Sometimes, what starts out as a harmless bit proves to be an opportunity to dive deeper beneath the surface of a character, like how Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) recounting his attempts to complete a ridiculous dating challenge in an imaginary ESPN post–game interview as the premise of the episode “Perfect Week” highlights how he uses meaningless sex to avoid facing his own abandonment issues.
Season seven, episode three, titled “Ducky Tie,” is an excellent showcase of this show’s genius writing. At this point, while the show was beginning to drag ever so slightly—mixtaped love triangles, a steady march towards its characters settling down into real adulthood—it was still very enjoyable and continued to strike the comedic beats that once made it so popular. And without this episode, the seventh season might not have picked up a narrative second wind that buoyed the characters cheerfully into their next chapter.
Like most successful episodes of HIMYM, the plot of “Ducky Tie” perfectly balances absurdity and realism and nestles narrative arcs creatively into one another. The gang goes to a hibachi restaurant for dinner, and in between Ted’s (Josh Radnor) retelling of his chance encounter with an old flame, Barney makes a bet with married couple Marshall and Lily (Alyson Hannigan): If he can perfectly perform every knife trick that their hibachi chef shows them, Lily will consent to letting him see her topless—a joke request he’s been running for multiple seasons by now. If not, he has to wear Marshall’s ridiculous duck–patterned tie for an entire year.
Already, our slowly earned characterizations slot nicely into place. Ted is our constant hopeless romantic, and the story he tells is comfortably in–character while still managing to keep the audience interested in what will happen next. Barney is incredibly self–confident—it’s impossible to know if he’s bluffing his abilities out of sheer arrogance, or has been concocting some insane conspiracy for months to learn this niche trade. He’s also vain about his appearance, someone who would never be caught dead dressing down from his usual immaculate suit and tie. He wants to be able to pick up girls, and he wants the professional world to respect him. It should make no sense for him to accept this bet, just like Lily, notoriously disapproving of Barney’s playboy lifestyle, should never even entertain this grotesque—and technically adulterous—ploy.
But both take up this bet because they value the thrill of the competition more than their own dignity. Lily wants to humiliate Barney, and it’s in Barney’s nature to construct insane elaborate schemes for the story he’ll be able to tell afterward. It’s fun to watch Lily and Marshall oscillate between being assured that Barney is just trying to trick them and their slow realization that he’s been plotting this whole thing long before tonight. Despite its 20–minute runtime, the tight script of “Ducky Tie” manages its comedic timing well enough to leave clever clues along the way for both the characters and the audience to figure out the mini–mystery.
The episode also employs a typical HIMYM tactic in differentiating the A and B plots. The story of Ted running into his ex–girlfriend Victoria (Ashley Williams) is told as a past event during the “real–time” events of the hibachi bet, which grounds the situation in some necessary realism. Spliced between the beats of this ridiculously improbable bet is a very humanist story that resembles something your best friend might actually tell you around a bar booth … or a hibachi grill. This balance shines through other parts of the episode, as well; the bet itself is absurd, and Barney’s months of careful manipulation of his friends would be entirely illogical in the real world, but setting an entire episode around the idea of one friend making another one wear a joke tie for an entire year—a la Fantasy Football punishments—is a motivation that’s just stupidly realistic enough to work.
HIMYM is a lot more willing to take risks in terms of recurring plot beats than other sitcoms of its time. In this episode, we see attempts at cohesive longevity in both directions. Victoria, in her realist, bittersweet cameo, emerges after the show has long left her behind, when it would be far easier to keep her in the past in pursuit of Ted’s true love. And when Barney eventually, spectacularly, loses the bet, he wears the tie for the entire first half of Season 7—directly affecting his interactions and general costumed presentation—until he eventually wins the right to take it off early. Sitcoms are used to staying sanitized and pristine, with unobtrusive wardrobes, iconic sets, and joke styles that are intentionally designed to fit the episodic nature—ideally, audiences should be able to jump in anywhere and feel like they’re able to pick up on what’s happening. A bit like the ducky tie disrupts this stagnant, timeless feeling, potentially alienating newcomers who might just want to check in for one episode, one week.
But HIMYM has always gone deeper than its early 2000s peers. The show is known for building on previous inside jokes and naturally calling back to people, events, and infamous running gags such as the slap bet—which not only ensures a loyal, invested audience over the years but also makes the characters feel like a real friend group, improving on the blueprint established by the best parts of shows like Friends, while also dipping its toes into more experimental and wacky comedic territory that is similar to what a show like Dan Harmon’s Community would pioneer just a few years later.
What makes HIMYM so fascinating is that, at its core, it’s a show about storytelling. Every narrative is a story inside a story, and every character and event is a piece of the story Ted is telling to his kids about how he met their mother. The show is unafraid to confront the implications of unreliable narration through flashbacks that are adjusted for skepticism or shock value—more often than not, pathological liar Barney is the culprit of spinning some incorrect version of events—but every story comes from the voice of the overarching narrator, told in the way Older Ted wants his kids—and us—to perceive him. We never really know what is real, what is embellished, what is invented. And to their credit, Bays and Thomas don’t encourage us to abandon our critical lens to simply enjoy the show, nor do they insist that we constantly question the reliability of Ted’s narration. Through mature and intellectual storytelling that’s mostly unwaning up until the end, these two ideas can and do exist simultaneously in a thematic harmony.
The world of television will continue to grow and advance, and with the slow death of the singular entertainment monoculture into more and more fractured niches, the multi–camera sitcom is almost certainly a relic of the past. But some of these older shows have a lot of storytelling wisdom to offer, and for that reason, they will always be worth returning to, even just for a familiar laugh. To bungle a quote from the show, "new is not always better."
