Have you ever been alone in a crowded room when I'm here with you?

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room; well I'm here with you...

The Main Reason Why How I Met Your Mother is Awesome

HIMYM is awesome; probably one of the best, if not the best, television series I have ever watched.  Now, it's true that I haven't seen seasons 7 and 8 so there's plenty of time for it to get awful.  I reserve the right to rescind my opinion as the remaining two seasons play themselves out.  Still, from what I've seen so far, I will say that HIMYM is, to me, what Boy Meets World was to my teenage self: the show that encapsulates everything I love, hate, and worry about during the years I spent watching it.

On a less personal level, HIMYM uses an effect that I believe is the main reason why so many people love the show.  Of course, it's possible that people love the show for the same reasons I do, but I don't want to be presumptuous about whether other people hold the same values as I do and are thus affected by HIMYM because it reaffirms said values.  Rather, I think that HIMYM does an excellent job at showing how seemingly innocuous details from one episode become significant in later ones.

When my friends first started watching HIMYM, I was struck by how often they would talk about an episode and how "amazing" it was.  This wasn't your run of the mill, "it was hilarious" or "it made me cry" type of amazing - it was, apparently, the kind of amazing that I had to "see to understand."  That piqued my interest because to hear them talk about it, it sounded like HIMYM had the effect of producing an explosion in the brain - mind-blowing in a figurative, but more literal sense.  Due (likely) to sheer laziness, I never assuaged my curiosity regarding this phenomenon by watching the show.  Now that I've seen it, I understand why.

It's a clever tactic, really.  By showing that details from one episode - details that aren't directly related to the arc of that specific episode - can become significant in a future one, the writers tapped into the most appealing part of your standard Agatha Christie mystery novel... except that it's not presented as one.  That's the most curious thing - even though this technique is used over and over again, the writers manage to come up with ways to do this without making the audience suspect that the innocuous detail they are watching will become significant later.

The psychology behind it is interesting.  It's as if the writers know that viewers usually forget details that aren't directly related to the plot of the particular episode they are watching.  In fact, they are so sure of this that they have, on occasion, inserted dialogue that looks something like this:

Person 1 is dealing with some issue when Person 2 walks in, clearly having dealt with another issue off screen.
Person 1: What happened to you?
Person 2: I'll tell you later.  What happened to you?
Person 1: Well...

Person 1 will then bring the viewers back to the plot and the writers assume, correctly, that audiences will forget that Person 2 even had an issue off screen.  Like I said, it's an interesting bit of psychology.

Still on the vein of using techniques that you'd find in mystery novels, HIMYM also does a great job at understanding the assumptions that viewers will make regarding the links between scenes that are adjacent to one another.  All it takes is for you to adjust your paradigm slightly in order to see how everything you've witnessed can mean something different and yet, nobody really bothers to do so; it is a sitcom, after all, and maybe the writers counted on that to make the show work.

Of course, all the mind-blowing story arc techniques would be for naught (IMO) if the ideas and stories themselves weren't romantically intriguing and (for the most part) morally wholesome.  I'd like to write a screenplay for a sitcom like that except it takes me forever to think of ways to utilize the particular technique I've outlined here.  It's the same reason why I don't think I could write a mystery novel even though I love them.  It's like performing a good magic trick - and goodness knows, I've tried and failed at that.

Fucking magic tricks... seriously...

Dad: You don't get along with him [my uncle]?
Me: Are you kidding?
Dad: What don't you like about him?
Me: He's everything I teach my students NOT to be.
Dad: That bad, huh?

Student: Mr. Wong, is it true that you never compliment students?
Me: Who told you that?
Student: That's what I heard from my friends who are in your class.
Me: Well, it's not entirely true; it's not that I never compliment students so much as it is that I'm very hard to impress.
Student: Oh...
Me: You think that's weird because the first thing I ever said to you was how great you were in the play last week.
Student: Well yeah... sort of...
Me: Well, you impressed me.  And doesn't that kinda feel good because you know I wouldn't say it unless I genuinely thought you were very good?
*student grins*
Me: That's kind of what I aim for.