A review of last night’s “How I Met Your Mother” coming up just as soon as I spend 7 grand on merch…
Let’s try to accentuate the positive, shall we? I can say the following things in favor of “Nannies”:
1)Even though it was telegraphed from the start that Lily’s dad would wind up taking care of Marvin, the final scene with the two of them, featuring flashbacks to Lily’s childhood and flashforwards to Marvin’s journey to preschool (a journey we won’t see unless CBS is determined to never let the show end), was very sweet, and an example of “HIMYM” using its time-bending powers in service of the story being told right now, rather than as a tease for something a little ways down the road.
2)Jane Carr was her reliable comedy pro self as Mrs. Buckminster.
3)Just when I was ready to completely hate Barney for screwing Marshall and Lily over on the nanny situation, A)he offered to pay Mrs. Buckminster’s salary, and B)Robin and the others made it clear that Bangtoberfest was not something we were meant to applaud, but a sign of an unhealthy post-Quinn spiral.
4)The run of jokes about George Jorgenson’s Organs was clever.
5)The show is at least acknowledging the logistics of how Lily and Marshall remain part of the gang by having them tag team the childcare (and putting them in the apartment above MacLaren’s helps).
So there’s that. But the Barney and Ted/Robin stories were pretty terrible.
Even though the show tried not to treat Bangtoberfest like it has the rest of Barney’s career of tricking gullible women into having sex with him, it still feels like that joke is long past its sell-by date. NPH invests it with as much joy and energy as he can, but it doesn’t work anymore.
And the Ted/Robin clicking competition failed because the show hasn’t made any effort whatsoever to tell us who Nick is, nor to show Ted spending any real time with Victoria since they got back together. I talked last week about how Future Ted’s pronouncements of impending doom makes it hard to invest in these relationships to begin with, and it’s like the show doesn’t even want us to bother. If not for Ashley Williams’ stint in the first season, it would be like these two characters don’t exist at all, and at that point, who the hell cares which one of them is clicking more with one of our regulars? Especially when the story featured Ted at his most insufferable, and dragged Robin down to that level?
What did everybody else think?