Controversial Netflix Sitcom Finale Doesn’t Deserve The Hate

It’s been a little over 10 years since the How I Met Your Mother finale first aired, and most of the show’s fans are still bitter. I honestly can’t think of a more hated finale in sitcom history. Maybe Seinfeld, but it’s debatable.

To be fair the How I Met Your Mother finale had a lot of ground to cover and only an hour in which to do so—less with commercials. The series that had just spent an entire season covering a single weekend suddenly had to craft an ending that would address years in one double episode. Even the most well-crafted narratives would buckle under that kind of pressure.

So what exactly went wrong? In my opinion, it’s not the finale that faltered. It’s the show itself.

Creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas had the How I Met Your Mother finale mapped out from the very beginning. They even filmed part of it—the part where Ted Mosby interacts with his teenage children—all the way back in season 2. Robin and Ted were always supposed to end up together.

Of course, Bays and Thomas also pulled the series’ biggest twist in the first episode. They introduced us to Robin—the love of Ted’s life—and, at the pilot’s end, addressed her as “Aunt” to Ted’s kids. I only bring this up to illustrate that the moment the creators decided Robin wouldn’t be the Mother, they cemented the Mother’s character as a gimmick.

One of the biggest complaints about the How I Met Your Mother finale is how quickly Ted and the Mother’s romance is glossed over. Ted found the one, and then she died.

But the Mother was always supposed to be a plot device. Something had to happen to her so that Ted and Robin could end up together. The real problem was keeping them apart for nine seasons until the How I Met Your Mother finale.

Simply put, the series was a victim of its own success. It went on for longer than anyone expected and, as a result, had to keep coming up with story lines to delay the inevitable mother reveal. Anytime you do that much build-up in a story, the ending—in this case, the reviled How I Met Your Mother finale—is always going to be a letdown.

Story lines like Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin’s marriage were created to extend the series’ life. Sadly, that union was also a victim of the How I Met Your Mother finale. The show had to make it seem believable that these two characters who started out despising each other would actually fall in love, and unfortunately, it did too good of a job.

Both Robin and Barney’s relationship and the titular Mother were handled so well that fans didn’t want to see either killed off to serve Ted and Robin’s story. But Ted and Robin were always the point. In many ways, How I Met Your Mother is a fairy tale, finale and all.

Ted may not have started his story with “Once upon a time,” but he was telling the kids a fairy tale version of his past all the same. And as a fairy tale, the two romantic interests from the very beginning have to end up together at the end.

To me, the How I Met Your Mother finale ends on the perfect note. Lily (Alyson Hannigan) and Marshall (Jason Segel) are thriving; Barney has his daughter, and Ted…

Ted, of course, shows up on the sidewalk beneath Robin’s apartment window holding the blue French horn he stole for her in the first episode.

The show ended exactly as it should have, or at least that’s what the romantic in me thinks. If you’d like to see how the How I Met Your Mother finale holds up 10 years later, the entire series is streaming right now on Netflix.