Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, creators and show runners of How I Met Your Mother, have based their show in reality.  Since it is TV, the characters on How I Met Your Mother have really cool jobs, live in apartments far bigger than reality would dictate, and are probably better looking than anybody you or I know.  But when you wrestle past all that superfluous stuff, all the TV-embellished day-to-day aspects of the series, there is a basis in truth that few other shows come close to capturing.  How I Met Your Mother touches on what it's like to be in your twenties, and the issues that inevitably arise as you make that slow death march to your thirtieth birthday.  Last night, How I Met Your Mother dealt with the issue of moving out of town, the toll it takes, and the eventuality of your friends taking the plunge. 

As a person in his mid-twenties, a lot of last night's episode hit home.  When you live in a city, your group of friends is always in flux.  New characters arrive on the scene, old friends depart, people take new jobs out of town, others shack up and hit the suburbs – it's a constant and endless line-up card shuffle.  One of the sobering realities of life is that, if you look around you and identify who your closest friends are, you can say with certainty that most of these people will exist on the periphery of your life in ten years, if at all.  When a friend moves away – even if it's twenty miles to the suburbs – you get diminishing returns on your friendship. 

I've seen it first hand.  A friend will move closer to their job or their significant other and head out of town.  They will be optimistic at first:  they'll come back to the city often, they'll have friends up to see their new place, etc.  It might work for a little while, but then it becomes more and more work for everyone, until you realize that a person you used to see multiple times a week you now only see once a month.  Maybe they'll move back, and everything will go back to normal.  Maybe it won't.  This is also the time when friends get married, and if that's the case, then a return to “the way it was” is not an option. 

And that's fine.  This is life, and people move apart.  How I Met Your Mother handled the situation deftly last night.  Ted's love of New York has always been apparent, even if his love is often over-stated.  He deifies New York, because that's what he thinks he's supposed to do.  How I Met Your Mother has always contended that the company you keep is exceptionally important.  No matter what else befalls you, what romantic entanglements you enter into, your friends will always be there.  Not only that, the friends will always be as important as any other aspect of your life. 

Bays and Thomas are now consciously moving the main characters apart, and forcing them to make choices that will severely impact the group of friends.  If Ted moves to Jersey and Robin moves to Japan, how will that change the friend paradigm that has been well-established?  Barney won't want to be third wheel to Marshall and Lily, and Ted isn't ready to be a suburban home-body.

When it comes to the decision of where to live with a significant other, suburbs versus city is a real deal-breaker.  Personally, I'm a city kid and I know I will never be able to live in the suburbs.  I know people from the suburbs who, after a college dalliance with the metropolis, receded back into the warm arms of cookie-cutter neighborhoods and Chili's franchises.  You see these people less and less.  The fact is this – you make friends where you live, and the older you get, the harder it becomes to cultivate relationships with out-of-towners.

The gauntlet was thrown down last night on How I Met Your Mother.  Ted will reluctantly move to the suburbs, though I'm sure Stella will be stricken with guilt for moving Ted out of the city he loves.  Marshall, on the other hand, has finally verbalized his small-town values to Lily, who was completely taken off-guard.  Robin has made that age-old decision to further her career at the expense of her comfort and social stability (don't worry, she'll be back in the NYC soon enough).  I have the feeling that Stella is not the mother, one reason being a fairly glaring plot hole – Future Ted's kids probably would have said something about their older step-sister at some point if Stella really were the mother.  They would also know that their mom's name was Stella (unless Future Ted has changed the name in order to trick his kids). 

Oh, the episode was funny too.  Barney's fist-bump needs, Marshall's ode to Jersey and Robin's farewell monologue were my favorite moments, though I'll probably remember the episode more for its themes than its humor, which is an impressive thing to say about a half-hour network comedy.


-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of CBS)