Welcome to a new Sitcom Tuesday! My coverage of How I Met Your Mother will begin next week. In the meantime, I’m excited to set the figurative table by resurrecting an entry from this blog’s twelve-year run. As usual, I’ll provide a link to a piece that I first published several seasons ago, and then I’ll offer a bit of updated commentary, relevant to today…

Let’s revisit… The Ten Best FRIENDS Episodes of Season Nine: https://jacksonupperco.com/2018/09/04/the-ten-best-friends-episodes-of-season-nine/

I’m eager to begin my look at How I Met Your Mother. It’s the defining ensemble rom-com of the 2000s, extending the “singles in the city” subgenre that shows like Friends made popular a decade prior. As you know, I like to draw lines of ancestry between sitcoms covered here, emphasizing connections that help us understand the genre’s own evolution and the context in which every series exists. For Mother, I’ll be offering comparisons to two very influential titles from the 1990s — Seinfeld and Friends, both ensemble “hangout” comedies set in New York City with their leads’ dating woes a prime subject matter. The link between Mother and Seinfeld mostly has to do with their sense of humor, and the basic idea-driven tenor that not only enables similar comic notions (e.g., named bits of social trivia that the group accepts as shared lore or principle), but also emphasizes the clever, unique way plots are arranged — a complicated storytelling. With Friends, the link is more literal — Mother is about its regulars’ relationships, with long-form plot tracking their pursuit of happy romantic endgames. Both then and now, it’s easy to see Mother as an updated Friends. And indeed, there are structural notes that make comparisons inevitable — like a pilot-born romance between two leads (Ted/Robin) that positions them as a focus (à la Ross/Rachel), despite one half of this couple (Robin) later partnering with another member (Barney) of the ensemble (à la Rachel/Joey). Of course, there are huge distinctions too. The Barney/Robin pairing is very different from Rachel/Joey — (a) it comes along earlier, (b) they’re actually more compatible, and (c) we’re told that Ted has a major story-ending love coming later, making it seem necessary for Robin to thus have one of her own. That is, Mother promises an overarching plot about how its narrator met the future mom of his kids — and we’re told right away she’s not Robin. This primes the show to be about something other than Ted/Robin… and it speaks to the main way Mother is an evolution from Friends, boasting a high-concept idea-driven hook that, just as we’ve seen with other mid-2000s shows like The Office and 30 Rock, adds a gaudy conceptual wrinkle to an otherwise familiar, low-concept design. Indeed, Mother is a quintessential example of the genre in this era — offering a “twist” on the similar shows that came before, like Friends and Seinfeld. I look forward to sharing more soon…

Come back next week for How I Met Your Mother! And stay tuned Monday for a musical treat!