10 TV Shows That Failed To Stick The Landing

Romantic comedies tend to use a tried and tested formula. Boy meets, loses, and gets back the girl, generally in under two hours. When it started, How I Met Your Mother seemed to be doing something different, breaking the mould. The main character meets this perfect girl, who turns out to be… one of his close pals. Ted and Robin, we were promised, were not to be. This was the story of another woman, who we waited eight long years to meet, before they killed her off and Ted shacked up with Robin anyway.

Televised kicks in the teeth don’t come much harder than that. The whole premise of the show was that this was an incredible, fated love story, so dramatic and star crossed that it would hold Ted’s kids’ attention for years on end. Instead, we got maybe an hour and a half’s screen time out of this admittedly delightful character before she snuffs it and Ted ends back right back where he started.

What’s more, the writers had made it abundantly clear that Ted and Robin were a dreadful couple who seemed destined to make each other utterly miserable. They had a bunch of attempts at making it work when they were young and attractive and they couldn’t do it. Now, well into middle age, something had apparently changed? How I Met Your Mother had dipped in quality a great deal by this point, but the final season showed signs of life - the ending went a long way to killing that off, along with Ted’s wife.

Watching TV is, to some extent, inherently a waste of time, but the stories we’re told sometimes give us something to take away, be that moral guidance or just a warm, fuzzy feeling. All How I Met Your Mother gave us was a reminder that TV writers sometimes make it up as they go along, with no clue whatsoever as to where things are leading.