Why How I Met Your Mother is so successful ?

In this last post, I want to discuss why How I Met Your Mother works so well.

In fact when you look at how the show is maid, you see that it’s the perfect representation of our lives, even if we are not New Yorkers or American. It represents a group of friends living, with the good and the less good things which can happen in a life. And because the main story is a simple thing, we can see us, in some way, in the episodes. When you can find a link with you, even a small one, you will be more focused on what you see.

When we focus on the communication aspects, you can see that, first, the characters well represents our culture. Not a single main character represents a minority. Obviously it’s racism, but when you look at the “real” world, you see that racism is still there, but in a minor way.

Also you have the representation of the complexity of the people’s mind. When you look at Ted character, you can see every people who think a lot (maybe too much). When you look at Robin’s character, you have the representation of the trouble to be a woman at work: you always have to choose between your family life and your professional life. By looking at Marshall and Lilly, you have the representation of the perfect couple in the 21^st century: they like each other, they try to talk a lot to avoid the troubles, they work as a team to make their couple work, but sometimes it doesn’t work and they broke up. It represents a “normal” couple who also have trouble. And when you look at Barney, he represents the people who don’t really know what they want to do about their lives and act like teenagers. But when he finds what he really wants, he does everything he can.

This show is full of bias because media are never neutral as is our culture. In How I Met Your Mother, you have stereotypes, arbitrary signs, sexism ...  But when you analyze a little bit the show and don’t look at it as an innocent viewer, you will learn things about your life and you can be able to improve that, and that’s why How I Met Your Mother is so successful, it’s that you can learn from yourself and try to be what you want to be.

Barney: representation of a gender

When you look at How I Met Your Mother and pay attention to the gender point of view, the character of Barney is perfect to analyze.

He is the perfect representation of the ambiguity of masculinity nowadays. 

On one hand, he is the typical men: dominant, powerful and sexually successful. He has a great financial situation due a job, we don’t really what he does in the company but he’s well paid and it seems that he is in charge of important decisions. For example, in one episode he was the project manager for the creation of the new building of the Goliath National Bank and he makes the decision to pick his friend (Ted) project. What also his dominant and powerful position, is that he has a man who will do what he wants. For example he has a man for his costumes and he even has a man to find a men. The presentation of Barney can’t be relevant without the sexual part. All is life turns around women. And he is really good at having sex with women. He is so good that he reached the huge number of 200 women with whom he had sex. And because all this is a game for him, to make it harder, he tries different techniques. In one episode he shows to his friends a book in which all he’s techniques are described. And because real men have to reach goals, he challenges his self all the time, to have sex with one different woman every night during an entire week for example.

And on an other hand, he also is the representation of the “new man”. He takes care of him a lot: he always wear suits, he gets manicure, massages ... And in the most recent seasons, be begin to see a Barney who show his feelings. He felt in love with Robin, thing that would never have happened before. Now even if makes jokes about his feelings, to still be “strong as a real man”, he opens his mind to his friends  and become more vulnerable to the life and he starts to be a “real person” instead of the patriarchal vision of the man taking of his family.

How I Met Your Mother and racism

How I Met Your Mother is a sitcom in which we follow a group of New Yorker friends.

Even if New York is considered as the most representative city of the melting pot, Ted, Lilly, Marshal, Robin and Barney are all Caucasian. It show that even if people try to be more equal in the tv shows or movies, the most recurrent African American man who appear more than once in the sitcom is Barney’s brother: James. This is a kind of racism and exclusion, because this group of friends is supposed to represent an average group of friends in New York and it seems that the average New Yorker is not African American. 

Even we think that the most know racism is toward foreigners, it also “works” with people in your country. Because the USA is composed of multiple states, each one can be considered as a small country. In How I Met Your Mother, we can see that with Marshall and the representations of citizens of Minnesota. If you look at how people from Minnesota are this sitcom, it’s a perfect representation of stereotypes. They are all 6.6, they are strong, they like violent games (as we see in an episode where we learn that Marshall and his brothers use to do free fight in the living room when they were young). In one episode, we also see that they like bad food: the special meal of the Eriksen family is made of mayonnaise, chips and candies. And there are also stereotypes we think are good but not obviously. In Minnesota it seems that people like tailgating a lot, they also love the Vikings and they are friendly with everybody. It seems to be “good” racism but in fact it can be analyzed this way: people from Minnesota are weak-minded because they act like children. They love everybody and they like sports, like hockey, as children do. 

In fact even people don’t think that this a also bad stereotypes, it can be considered like that from the people represented like that.