10 Most Insane TV Show Storylines Ever

9. How I Met Your Mother's Final Season Covers One Weekend

How I Met Your Mother initially found itself with unfavourable and mostly unfair comparisons to a similar show about the lives and loves of twentysomething friends in New York City. Twenty guesses what that show was called.

Where How I Met Your Mother parted company from other, similar sitcoms was in its gimmickry. With the titular framing device detailing the conclusion of the story, the show was laden with so many references, callbacks, flashbacks, flashforwards, special episodes, themed episodes and odd narrative devices that anyone unfamiliar with it dipping into it in later seasons would have been forgiven for wondering if some hapless TV executive had lost their minds to hallucinogens.

Season nine, the controversial send-off of the show, was no exception€ in fact, it was to prove the rule in spectacular fashion, creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas revealing before the season premiere that the all 24 episodes would form an arc-based narrative taking place over one weekend. At 22 minutes per episode, that's nearly nine hours of situation comedy, with the situation being a wedding at a hotel one weekend. That's a skinny premise for a 90-minute movie, never mind a full-length season of a hit sitcom.

Critics are divided as to whether the idea was creatively successful, or just a little stupid, and the series finale certainly turned some heads, the majority of viewers concluding that they had wasted nine years of their lives waiting to meet 'The Mother'.