10 TV Shows Literally One Step From Perfection

This’s a tough one, mainly because of how many people will take the premise a step further and say the best way to save this show is by killing off its lead character. Like its predecessor Friends and later “hang-out show” New Girl, a vocal portion of How I Met Your Mother’s fanbase maintains that protagonist Ted Moseby was the worst part of the show, and that the chemistry of the overall ensemble would actually be improved by his absence.

However, reads like this do tend to dismiss how irritating a lot of other characters became over the years (looking at you, Lily, despite Alyson Hannigan’s best attempts), and how one-note many of the characters actually were in isolation. How funny could a show about Barney Stinson really be without anyone around to temper his schemes?

What is much easier to defend is the view that the show should have dropped the central eponymous conceit, with the slow hints at the mother’s identity becoming more vague and less consequential with each passing season.

Failing a full-blown overhaul of the show’s framing device, the creators could have at least introduced and integrated the mother character earlier than the show’s final season, or jettisoned the tasteless “reveal” that Ted was actually—shocker—looking for permission to date Robin this entire time.