Why How I Met Your Mother is the Best Sitcom Right Now

The 90s was where sitcoms strive. Sitcoms were the pinnacle of TV back then. All shows from Seinfeld to Cheers to Friends were the favorite of the baby boomers. Those shows were the best tv shows around, with their classic 3 camera setup and recurring characters. In the 2000s, sitcoms were replaced by reality television with the Osbournes, Kardashians and American Idol.

Nowadays, you can flip channels but you’ll only see police procedural, teen dramas and the mentioned mindless reality shows. You can barely see any sitcoms on TV anymore. However, the last few years you can now get some laughter if you watch How I Met Your Mother. On the surface, you might think How I Met Your Mother is just another show about a group of friends in New York. But if you deep digger, you’ll see it is everything a sitcom fanatic can hope for. How I Met Your Mother is even straying away from the old sitcom formula and coming up with creative and unique episodes. It is very hard to come up with new things for the sitcom as it has been around for years and years, so any unique and different approach to sitcom is a breath of fresh air.

If you watch How i met your mother season 1 last night, you’ll see that the episode is a great example of how it takes story telling, camera work and comedy into a whole new realm. The episode reminds me of Memento, where the whole story is being revealed to the audience in multiple flashbacks, flash forwards and finally an conventional retelling of the whole event chronologically. You never see this in a traditional sitcom.

Don’t for a second think I’m saying How I Met Your Mother is the Best TV show right now. It is not the best but it does what it aims for best – making people laugh. The writers are handling the characters well with plot development and weekly jokes. However, I do wish that the writers can focus more on the other aspects of the characters and not just stick to their romantic relationships. With that said, there is nothing to worry about as the show is still in its early stages and the writers have plenty of room to wriggle about. There’s still plenty of stories to explore with How I Met Your Mother.

As an avid comedy fan myself, I am very glad that the networks and writers are willing to take a risk with sitcom. How I Met Your Mother might even be the start of the comeback of situational comedies. I certainly wish that would happen. I miss entertaining and funny shows. Not just the boring reality shows and predictable police dramas. Making people laugh is another art form itself. We can take solace that there is still one show out there that is aiming to make us smile.