How I Met Your Mother Ending: 10 Past Faults It Must Avoid

2. Avoid The Gimmicks

As season 8 of How I Met Your Mother arrived on Netflix, I began to rewatch it. I distinctly remember it being a rather below average season, with a few highlights in "The Time Travellers" and "Something New". As I got deeper into the season, however, I found a new appreciation for it. It certainly wasn't the best season ever produced, but there was a certain charm to it that I didn't quite recall. However, the one thing in season 8 that the writers never quite fixed, was the overabundance of gimmicks and overty broad sitcom humour.

The great sitcoms never rely on these things. They may use them occasionally, just as a quick surge of story telling, but season 8 of HIMYM relied so heavily on gimmicks that it often failed to maintain the more subtle sitcom humour that it used to great effect in the early seasons. And this seemed to be limited mainly to Marshall and Lily, two characters that the writers have struggled to write for recently. There seems to be no logical idea of how to write them, which is likely why season 8 saw Marshall channel his inner diva and wear a sex-inducing wrist cuff. It was cringe-inducing, and has unfortunately still been a part of the final season, including an atrocious rhyming episode that I turned off after 5 minutes. If the series finale of HIMYM is going to succeed, it has to avoid these stupid gimmicks. Straight storytelling is all you need. That's all that we, as fans, ever needed.