When How I Met Your Mother first started in 2005, the concept was fresh and innovative: told in flashback throughout, with framing devices and callbacks making it the ultimate shaggy dog story, lead character Ted Goddamn Mosby (played by Josh Radnor) would tell his kids the story of how he met their mother. Nine years later, any vestiges of goodwill that the show and especially Ted Goddamn Mosby had with the audience were well and truly shredded. Ted, intended to be a lovelorn romantic on the lookout for Miss Right, had very quickly become the kind of self-obsessed indie-kid bore that you want to slap, and slap hard. As time went on, and on and on, Ted Goddamn Mosby became first everything you disliked about twentysomething blokes, and then everything you disliked about people in general. Hed treat his girlfriends like crap, then whine about how he could never find anyone. Hed mope about wanting to fall in love and get married, then go out on the pull with his weird, emotionally stunted friend Barney, treating women like pieces of meat. He would repeatedly demand love from close friend Robin, despite knowing that they werent right for each other, constantly begging for attention, neediness and insecurity oozing from every pore like flop sweat. When we finally met The Mother, Tracy McConnell (played beautifully by Cristin Milioti) was everything that Ted had wanted his future wife to be, and more than justified the long wait for the audience to meet her. There was just one problem. By that time, Ted Goddamn Mosby didnt deserve her, and hadnt for some years. Why Ted Goddamn Mosby? You try spending 208 episodes with the insufferable little maggot.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
