(the only way Barney learns to finally treat women with respect is by creating one? Oh, fuck off.)

At first I thought this was a Dr. Krieger situation.

I've never watched a single episode but I admire your passion about network sitcoms.

@ 2 What's wrong with network sitcoms?

And no don't kill Ted he is cool just don't kill the mom.

Holy crap, I watched every god damned episode of that humiliating shitball, and watched the final this morning.

And yup, that's what I walked away with; I watched all of that for some reason.

Network sitcoms are unfunny mass-market garbage. If you watch them you're a bad person and you should feel bad.

@5;
I felt bad after watching the first episode.
And now... Yeah...

Good, good. Let the rustling flow through your jimmies.
/popcorn

208 episodes of time well spent?

I was just glad to see that Ross and Rachel ended up together.

Meanwhile I'm hanging with the Gov

@3: I don't know. Did someone say there was?

Oh, @5 did!

I have never seen HIMYM but regarding series finales always disappointing, I disagree.

Star Trek TNG, DS9, and Voyager all had good finales, same with The West Wing, and both Futurama finales were satisfying. Cowboy Bebop had a phenomenal ending that had me screaming at the TV that there should have been a happy ending.

What I think is messing things up is that while TV shows have embraced the dark characters and anti-heroes, they still rely on finales where everyone ends up happy or as well off as possible. Dexter pays no real consequences, Walter White gets to pass on millions to his wife and son while saving Jesse from the Neo-Nazis, etc.

Not only does that run counter to the foundation that the stories have been built on, we remember tragedies because they affect us so much more strongly than happy endings. That is why we remember Romeo and Juliet more than Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet more than A Comedy of Errors, and King Lear more than Twelfth Night.

I tried to sit through this dreck multiple times and couldn't. No one seems to want to acknowledge that this is a CBS sitcom. And CBS sitcoms ALWAYS suck. HIMYM gets graded on a curve simply because it's on CBS and it came out when multi-cam sitcoms with a laugh track/audience were going out of fashion.

Same for Big Bang Theory.

Glad it is finally dead.

I haven't seen any of season 9, and I'm glad I didn't watch any of it. It would just be on the same level as the Dexter finale.

@13 HIMYM will live forever because of the Crazy/Hot theory. But yeah, the last fifteen minutes or so of the finale blew so bad the blowback affects the whole show.

I've never seen the show, so maybe if I watched it in reverse chronological order it would get better over time.

I read the finale synopsis this morning and felt SO GOOD about giving up on this show two seasons ago. The first three or four seasons are still rock-solid by-the-numbers sitcom fare with a mostly great cast (I agree with you on Ted, but Robin is far more annoying to me). It was never anything more than that to me, so when it ceased making me laugh and instead made me angry that they were going back to the same well over and over and over...well, that's when I gave up.

The bigger problem with finales is that the show is usually far past its prime by the time the network/creator decides to end it, usually due to declining ratings or actors wanting to move on. It's always a business decision, never a creative one. It's rare for a show to go out on top, let alone have a satisfying end.

Perhaps an ending where Ted Mosby wakes up in bed next to Suzanne Pleshette?

@12, TNG and DS9 had great finales, not just good. Breaking Bad was great as well - a bit more blood, though.

The Lost finale was great as well. If someone didn't get it, that is sad.

MASH was overwrought in its final episode, and I'm sure the Seinfeld finale looked great on paper, but after the first (great) 20 minutes, it was slow and stupid.

I hadn't watched more than five minutes of How I met Your Mother before last night - I wondered if they were going for an Up kind of mini-story. The message I got is that fathers are important, and mothers are not.

I'm still waiting for the damn DS9 movie.

I gave up half way through the 2nd to last season.

Judging by the reaction today that was a wise choice.

I know that these "Hitler finds out..." videos are tired, but this one is pretty spot-on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84WTdDbQ…

god I hate this sitcom; almost as bad as the charley sheen one. you have bad taste lady.

@12 & 20: TNG's finale is a masterpiece. The framing, bringing back Yar for a final bow, -and Q, oh Q. It was a finale that didn't finish things, but FELT like a finale at the same time.

I still haven't seen the DS9 finale, or much of the later seasons, but now I'll probably start watching on Netflix again.

Best sitcom finale EVER.

I had never watched an entire episode of HIMYM (just a few seconds here and there), but watched the last one just for kicks (I'm possibly addicted to finales).

I'm guessing people have already brought up the finale of Mad About You in discussing the HIMYM finale? (Although probably few of the millennial fans of HIMYM have never seen one episode of Mad About You.)

Here's someone's recap of that finale...

"Mad About You – So check out this scenario: take one loveable sit-com about a loving couple and instead of sharing in this marital bliss in your last show, go the other way with it – and set it in the future no less. Janeane Garofalo guests as Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt’s adult daughter. Now bear in mind, the last time we saw the couple’s daughter she was an infant. So already, we know we’re jumping into the future for the final show. Here’s the rub, Paul and Jamie (Reiser and Hunt) not only aren’t mad about each other anymore, they’re divorced. The double-episode finale goes on to show how a maddening and neurotic Jamie forced her husband into getting a vasectomy, then having it reversed, then having it again – my head hurts already. This massive character shift of Jamie was really unsettling to devoted fans of the show. And their daughter captures all of this for a film because her dad was a filmmaker (Get it? It’s cute, right?). There’s much aggravation, there’s much New-York-Woody-Allenesque angst, but surprisingly no twists or turns. By the time the couple reconciles in the future, all of America has already tuned out. Bummer! Killed this show for me. I won’t even watch reruns anymore."

There are so many things they fucked up (the only way Barney learns to finally treat women with respect is by creating one? Oh, fuck off.)

I am always curious about criticisms like this one. Sure, it makes Barney's fictional character a flawed person (as we see again when his new "respect" causes him to tell two young women they are dressed innapropriately), but I think Barney is supposed to be a deeply flawed character. Not that I don't think there are some actual problems (for example, I got the impression we are supposed to think it is a good thing when Barney tells those women to go home and change into something appropriate), but I think the argument that a character is bad, therefore the show/writer/producer/etc is bad is a weak and fundementally flawed argument. Albeit one you see quite often.