While How I Met Your Mother echoes the formula of other successful sitcoms like Friends and Seinfeld by focusing on a group of friends in New York City, it introduces a new framing device: the main character, Ted, tells his children in 2030 about his journey to meet their mother. Like Friends, the show follows Ted, Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin as they hang out at a bar. However, it stands apart through its use of Ted as the sole narrator and flashbacks/forwards that build suspense around meeting his future wife. The show has found success through both mirroring familiar sitcom tropes but also introducing new storytelling elements.

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Running Head: OF SITCOMS AND OTHERS
Of Sitcoms and Others
Deyanira Mora
Universidad Latina de Costa Rica

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Of Sitcoms and Others
Could it be that there is a secret formula for landing a successful and long
running sitcom? Well, at least one has worked several times: a group of
friends living in New York, hanging out at their favorite place and going
through never ending relationships and mishaps. Yes, this is definitely the
formula ofSeinfeld,Friendsand let’s not forget, the hit British comedy
Couplings (of course, with the difference that it was not set in New York).
Now, the story is being repeated with How I Met your Mother, a six Emmy
Award winning sitcom that is going for its 8thseason coming September("How
I Met your Mother"). Although this television show echoes Friends in many
ways, where we have an inseparable gang in their late 20’s which includes a
perfect couple, a womanizer and an intellectual career guy with little luck in
finding love, in many other ways How I Met your Mother stands on its own
and has earned its success single-handed.
You could think that maybe the producers of How I Met your Mother, Craig
Thomas and Carter Bays, after seeing the success of the programs mentioned
above, especially Friends which ran for ten seasons, said to themselves: “Let’s
see if we can pull it off again”. However, that’s not the story since the show

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is actually loosely based on their lives andfollowing Craig Thomas’ idea to
“write about our friends and the stupid stuff we did in New York”("How I Met
your Mother"). So mirroring Friends, HIMYM is about a group of pals that live
in Manhattan and hang out after work at a nearby bar called McClaren’s
(remember Central Perk?). Lilly and Marshall, a kindergarten teacher and a
lawyer, are the happily married couple portrayed in Friends by Monica and
Chandler. There’s also, of course, the guy whose main purpose in life is to
hook up with as many girls as possible,with no interest whatsoever in any
kind of meaningful relationship. That’s Joey, right? This character in HIMYM
is Barney, a successful businessman with an innocent soul who is always
“suited up”, even when it comes to pajamas. Then there’s the Ross of the
group represented by Ted, a bright architect who constantly annoys the rest
with his language corrections and scholarly remarks.Finally we have Robin,
the pretty but also silly girl, who like Rachel, comes as a new face in the pilot
and quickly bonds with the whole group which, by the way, had started in
college with Ted and Marshall, just like Ross and Chandler. In Spite of all
these similarities, the show would not have been a success if it didn’t present
something different. This new ingredient to the formula, this element of

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surprise is not onlyin the plot, but also in the fact that in How I Met your
Mother there is only one main character, Ted.
In the year 2030, Ted Mosby, a successful architect, sits down his teenage
children, a boy and a girl,in the family living room and begins to tell them the
story of how he met their mother. This framing device differs from the
chronological order used in Friends. Ted’s anecdote begins in 2005 when he
was 25 and living with his college roommate, Marshall and his girlfriend Lily.
After Marshall and Lily get engaged, Ted decides that it is time for him to find
the right woman. That’s where his frustrated journey begins; dating one girl
after another and always hoping she is the one. Along with his story, we also
get to know about his friends and the humorous events of their lives. Every
episodes starts as a flashback and tells an adventure or situation that one of
the characters or the whole group encounters. On some occasions, the
producers also use a flash-forwardwithin the flashback, creating increasing
expectation to finally knowing the identity of Ted’s future wife. Every time a
new girl comes into Ted’s life, the spectators are lead to think she might
finally be the mother of his children, as a matter of fact, on one occasion Ted
almost gets married.Another interesting and new ingredientadded to the
formula in HIMYM is the use of euphemisms for culturally sensitive issues:

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These include “eating a sandwich” for smoking marijuana and… "playing the bagpipes" for
loud, raucous sex acts. These euphemisms, among others, have been used extensively
throughout the series and have even been used as central plot themes ("How I Met your
Mother").
In spite of the similarities between Seinfeld, Friends, Couplings and How
I Met Your Mother, each show presents a unique way of doing comedy.
Whether you are a fan of any of these sitcoms or not, How I Met Your
Mother offers a fresh new kind of entertainment full of laughter and
excitement, and above all great writing.
Reference
Wikipedia.(n.d). Retrieved on August 8, 2012, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother

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