One of the creators of the TV show ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Carter Bays in a recent interview talks about fans impatience at not yet meeting the mother referenced in the title. In the question before this Bays talks about the last girl Ted dates before meeting the mother.
Is she actually the last girlfriend? We’ve seen him try to do that before and it doesn’t go anywhere.
Bays: I know, but this will be the one that tops all of those. … I know people are impatient and we appreciated the impatience. I would contend that most people who watch the show watch it this way. We’re not trying to jerk anyone around, but if the series has a point, it’s not about the destination, but the journey. It’s about these five friends. We’re not making ‘Mad About You’. It’s not ‘How I Romanced Your Mother’, which would be a great show and there have been great iterations of that, but that’s not the show we’re doing. I appreciate people’s frustrations and would maybe ask them to forget the show’s title. If we had called it ‘Ted and His Buddies’ or something, maybe there’d be fewer complaints.
For me I have been impatient with the show really in the last two years. I have felt like they simply have not given fans enough clues or hints towards the mother to help tide us over until they finally decide to reveal her.
Also some of the reason I have had less patience with the show is that simply I have not enjoyed the journey as Bays referenced above as much as in earlier seasons. Maybe not a surprise since when I have felt this it has been during seasons 7 and the current season 8. It is an older show which is not a surprise that it gets harder to continue having good story lines after so many seasons. Maybe if I was still enjoying the journey I would not be as impatient as I am now about who the mother is.
The follow-up question to what I posted above touches on the connecting issue I have with the show:
Does that imply that we won’t see the courtship of the mother?
Bays: I still can’t say. [Laughs] But we’re going to start, I’m sure, frustrating a large segment of the viewership by answering a couple of small questions this season here and there before getting to the big shebang. We will get a couple more glimpses of her this year.
Personally I don’t to really want to for the first time meet the mother in the series finale and then have the show end. I can accept Bays saying that it is the journey to meeting the mother, but at some point I want to met her and get to know her for more than one episode. I feel like they could give new life to the show if they introduce the mother as a new full-time cast member and stop stalling.
As the show now stands I am really only continuing to watch because I have been a fan from the start. For me the show has fallen from a must see show or one that I want to catch up on if I miss an episode to not really caring if I miss a new episode now.
Edit: Of course tonight’s (12/17) two new episodes were good after I wrote this post in which I pored cold water on the quality of the show. Will see if they can keep it up, which I hope they can.