How I Met Your Mother and the importance of circularity

The TV show How I Met Your Mother could be considered as a unicum in the world of sitcoms because of its incredibly complex manner of storytelling, and in particular, because of the original way it develops its fabula around the concept of temporality.

Time is such a highly valued concept in How I Met Your Mother, that the whole sitcom is actually based on the premise of a flashback: it’s 2030 and Ted, the main character, is describing to his two sons how he met their mother.

In Ted’s story, the temporal details of his adventures stand out with unlikely precision, something that thanks to the “suspension of disbelief”, seems to be easily forgiven by the public.

Season, month, year, even time sequence of events. Ted remembers every single moment with incredible precision, making it possible for the many story arcs to come to a full conclusion, even many seasons after they started.

How I Met Your Mother does, in fact, utilise both human mental temporality and organic temporality (Fulton, 2005), in order to create as many detours as possible and keep the public always wondering what might happen next, and ever questioning if what was just shown was even real.

A clear example of the use of this technique can be found in the “The Ashtray” episode of season six, where one storyline is retold several times by the characters. Ted, Robin and Lily are in fact found narrating their personal mental temporality, via the use of many flashbacks, and sometimes even with flashbacks within flashbacks. This is done in order to help reconstruct the organic temporality of events and it is ultimately an excuse to reintroduce an older character into the story, so that he can offer Lily a life-changing job, fulfilling an even older story arc about her unsatisfying career, opened all the way back in season one and apparently left abandoned up to this point.

What is particularly interesting about How I Met Your Mother, in fact, is the capacity with which the series is capable of always giving a sense of circularity. The viewer is compelled to keep on watching episode after episode, knowing that although some of the story arcs may not be fully comprehensible yet, they will eventually be fulfilled.

This sense of closure is not only conveyed by the temporal structure of the show, but also via the use setting as the real sixth protagonist of the show.

Most episodes of How I Met Your Mother take place in either Ted, Marshall and Lily’s apartment, or at the MacLaren’s Pub with episodes often starting and ending there, giving a real sense of familiarity and providing circularity for each episode.

On a much bigger scale, the setting is also used as the glue between the show’s finale and its first episode, giving the audience an ending scene which is almost identical to the sitcom’s pilot. Ted steals the same French blue horn he had stolen for Robin after their first date, revisiting all of the familiar places including the French restaurant and the outside of Robin’s apartment.

The editorial choice of re-creating Ted and Robin’s first date, gives the audience a real sense of overall closure and fulfilment, indicating that although everything has changed from that very first scene, nothing has truly changed.

‘Chapter 1: Introduction: the power of narrative’ in: Fulton, H., Huisman, R., Murphet, J. and Dunn, A (eds.) Narrative and Media (2005). Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.

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