Monday, September 20, 2010

HIMYM

"It is going to be legend...wait for it...dary! What up? High five!"
-Barney Stinson, How I Met Your Mother

I'm pretty sure I'm super addicted to this show and have sad feelings about it's future ending. As a birthday gift my wife got me Seasons 1 and 2 on DVD. She knew I enjoyed the show, only watching it a handful of times in the last 5 years due to my teaching most nights of the week (the other CBS show I've been missing out on is The Big Bang Theory). But now I'm enjoying the show the way I like enjoying TV shows. Not by weekly piece-meal but in episodic droves.

I prefer to watch things as a whole as opposed to 30 minutes at a time. HIMYM needs to be watched as a whole. You can really enjoy the epicness, dare I say, the legendary quality of the show.

I'm not going to wax intellectual about the show since others already have and continue to do so.

"Haaaaave you met Ted?"
-Barney Stinson

http://have-you-met-ted.com/

The above URL is an awesome blog dedicated to HIMYM so check it out if you're at all interested in the show. It is epic.

My feelings toward the show are nostalgic if anything. I can connect, as I'm sure many viewers can, because that core group of friends is similar to my friends I grew up with in Chicago. The fortunate part is me and my wife are the closest equivalents to LAME, Lily Aldrin and Marshall Erickson. We are the couple that have been together forever (topic of another future blog) and we were the first to get married, get a house and to have kids, er, kid. Plenty of the gang's misadventures can somehow be related to things my friends and I have done in our lives together. I can't really think of any off hand but future edits will ensue in, well, the future.

The other reason I can connect to the show is the edgy and witty humor as well as the plenty of sophomoric and perverted jokes. In a nutshell, the writing is spot on to my kind of humor. Basic dick and fart joke writing blended with heartstring romantic comedy plotlines make for my kind of sitcom. Barney is the best character written in a long time. I don't really condone his womanizing at all but his sense of humor is freaking hilarious. I laugh out loud constantly when Barney is in on the conversation. NPH does a great job of making that character memorable and quoteable.

The edgy writing style makes for the other reason I enjoy the show. HIMYM, to me and my wife, similar to another show we grew up watching, obviously Friends, minus one other girl friend. The comparisons are limitless and I'm sure are discussed on some other blog (I'll have to find it one day). But my wife and I connected to friends because it was always part of the cultural zietgeist of our generation and again, it reminded us of our group of friend we grew up with. But this time we were Monica and Chandler. The huge difference in connecting to Friend and HIMYM is we are the same exact age range as the HIMYM gang as opposed to the Friends, er, friends. As Friends debuted my wife and I were in junior high school. As we got older and the Friend got older, we could connect on the relationships and even the professional side, but they were always 10 to 13 years our senior. The HIMYM group is exactly our age and all the jokes to the past I can relate to. Lily had her prom and graduated high school in 1996. My wife and I and all our close friends graduated between 1995 to 1998. In that prom episode Lily had Mia Wallace haircut. Mia Wallace of Pulp Fiction fame, which was a cultural phenomenon for my generation. And her date looked like Kurt Cobain, one of the musical icons of my generation. The fact that the HIMYM guys are the same age as me and my friends really helped to create that connection.

Obviously all the little cultural references are fantastic as well. Quantum Leap, Pulp Fiction, Laser Tag, all the music from the Violent Femmes to Otis Redding references, references to The Pixes and Sonic Youth, Marshall doing the robot, all the epic catchphrases, Nirvana, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ghost, the list just goes on and on. Those little things really make up the show for me.

As for the catchphrases...

We just got back from California this morning. We attended an awesome Malibu wedding (which I'll blog about next and all that was LA). The invites said "Cocktail Attire". I'm too lazy to wear an uncomfortable suit. Since our friend getting married is Filipina I went with the traditional Filipino formal dress, the barong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barong_Tagalog

Swan and I were on the dancefloor rocking to the epic band from Citrus College (again, I will blog about in the Cali blog). She observed that I was the only one wearing a Barong. I replied as the nerd that I am, "I Filipino SUITED UP!!!"

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