The Most Controversial Sitcom Of The Last Decade Is Now On Netflix

How I Met Your Mother follows a fairly standard format, with a handful of special episodes that break structure from time to time. Most episodes center on a friend group of functional alcoholics as they traverse the different elements of dating, leveling up their career paths, or generally growing up as they each enter their 30s. The friends include Robin (Cobie Smulders), a career-woman with dreams of delivering hard-hitting journalism, Barney (Neil Patrick Harris), the womanizing pathological liar, and Marshall (Jason Segel) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan), the quirky couple who serve as the show’s fundamental basis for a romantic success story.

At the center of the group we have a pretentious architect named Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), who kicks off the frame narrative by taking his children through a long-winded story of how he came to meet their mother after roughly a decade of stumbling through losses in his love life and career. Ted is a hopeless romantic, desperately seeking the perfect woman, especially if she can tolerate his red cowboy boots and obnoxious pronunciation of the word “renaissance.”

Over the course of 9 seasons, each spanning over 20 episodes, How I Met Your Mother offers a humorous look into one particular vignette from the group’s friendship at a time, including dating hi-jinks, hook-up strategies, and occasionally a sea captain who may or may not be a murderer.

While How I Met Your Mother still holds up in many aspects, there are certainly some elements of it that have aged awkwardly. When the show premiered, Barney was supposed to be a lovable playboy who would do anything to pick up chicks, though hindsight makes him look like a borderline sex offender in desperate need of therapy. Many of the dating strategies in the show were meant to be funny and harmless upon their original airing, but would never fly in a modern context.

The biggest controversy for How I Met Your Mother fans is the ending, which sees Ted Mosby finally meeting the woman of his dreams, only for the series to conclude before the audience could really see the relationship pan out. At the time, the ending really rubbed fans the wrong way, as they had been teased over the course of a full decade, just to have the rug pulled out from under them at the finish line.

Personally, I never caught How I Met Your Mother when it originally aired, and only became a fan last year after binge-watching the series with a hardcore fan. For me, the ending was a masterpiece, but I can definitely see how it would upset me if I had spent 9 years straight fantasizing about the way I wanted to see things play out.

If you check fan forums and other discussion boards online, you’ll see that many viewers have softened their opinion on the finale in the decade since the show concluded, though some still justifiably hold a bitter frustration over it.

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The show would go on to inspire a number of popular sitcoms which aired throughout the 2010s, and even got a short-lived sequel series titled How I Met Your Father. If you’re interested in seeing just how well How I Met Your Mother holds up today, the series is finally back on Netflix after being unavailable to the streamer for several years. Just be sure to strap in for a long ride, as the show accounts for over 100 hours of material.