Welcome to a new Sitcom Tuesday! My coverage of Happy Endings will begin in a few weeks. In the meantime, I’m excited to set the figurative table by resurrecting a post from this blog’s thirteen-year run — another show, and season, that has relevance for the next sitcom coming up on the docket. You know how this works — I’ll provide a link to a piece that I first published several seasons ago, and then I’ll offer some updated commentary, relevant to today…
This week, let’s revisit… The Ten Best HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER Episodes of Season Three: https://jacksonupperco.com/2025/08/05/the-ten-best-how-i-met-your-mother-episodes-of-season-three/
A year-and-a-half after Friends ended in 2004, a rival network offered a new hangout multi-cam rom-com about New Yorkers pursuing love. How I Met Your Mother was the most obvious and successful successor to that oft-copied hit. It covered similar narrative ground with shared themes but enjoyed a very different storytelling style — thanks to a higher-concept framework that further accentuated serialization and thus tended to prioritize story over character. Accordingly, it’s not my favorite. But it does represent an ongoing shift within the genre towards a more story-driven modus operandi — in accordance with changes in how viewers consume media. That is, the more “on-demand” television has become as a whole, the more plot-oriented and thus dramatic all content has become in an effort to retain viewership in an increasingly competitive market. But we’ve been over all that before, so I digress… The reason I wanted to highlight Mother here, and especially this third season, is, like last week’s Friends, it’s the year that had to deal with the aftermath of its initial central couple’s breakup. Ted and Robin split at the end of Season Two, and a large portion of Three has to reckon with the emotional residue of that development, all while justifying the maintenance of the situation — these five friends continuing to hang out together. It’s the very premise that Happy Endings provocatively opens up with in its pilot, and so reflecting back on how other similarly designed series handled this dramatic circumstance has been interesting. And it’ll be especially fun to compare Happy Endings’ character work to others in this subgenre… Stay tuned…
Come back next week for more sitcom fun! And stay tuned tomorrow for a new Wildcard!