In the season three How I Met Your Mother episode, “How I Met Everyone Else,” Barney introduced the rest of the gang, and us, to the closest a CBS show can get to the D.E.N.N.I.S. System: the Hot/Crazy Scale.
The Hot/Crazy Scale is a graph used to display someone’s hot-to-crazy ratio. As Barney explains in How I Met Everyone Else, a person is allowed to be crazy, as long as they are equally hot. Ideally, you want your date to be above the diagonal line, indicating that they are hotter than they are crazy. (Via)
There have been dozen of hookups over the course of How I Met‘s nine-season run, so with the finale around corner, I thought I’d rank 12 who pass the Hot/Crazy Scale. Three notes: I didn’t include any of the main five characters (so, Robin is exempt); Marshall and Lily don’t count because they basically only hooked up with each other; and it’s just women listed, because all of Robin’s boyfriends kind of sucked.
Except Enrique Iglesias. Make him the Mother.
12. Wendy the Waitress
Barney only THOUGHT she was crazy. But Wendy the Waitress, who first appeared working at MacLaren’s Pub in the fourth episode of the show, is actually a fairly well-adjusted woman, who, in the words of the actress who portrayed her, Charlene Amoia, is “so genuinely sweet and guileless…that she doesn’t realize she’s being taken advantage of.” Making out with Ted’s dad isn’t crazy; it’s “funny and harmless.”
11. Anna
Anna founded TedMosbyIsAJerk.com. LIFETIME NOT CRAZY PASS.
10. Stacey
Stacey plays bass in a reggae band, which is a big negative, but she otherwise seems like a sweet person who unfortunately gets in the middle of Barney and Ted’s game of ego. If anything, it’s actually Ted who’s crazy, considering he’s the one who left their date after seeing Stacey’s body covered with little Barneys (though Ted being an insecure lunatic is his problem with about 90 women over the course of How I Met).
9. Jenkins
Jenkins had the hots for Marshall. And can you blame her? They both hail from Minnesota. They both root for the Vikings (poor bastards). They both love Skeeball. Jenkins and Big Fudge would be the perfect pair, were it not for the fact that he’s already the Marshmallow to Lily’s Lilypad. She kisses him, he backs away, she says they already had sex in a closet, he explains that wasn’t him…it’s a story you’ve heard a million times before. Jenkins feels bad about what she did, and wishes to express remorse to Lily, but Marshall asks her to lie, and Jenkins ends up getting punched and beaten senseless by Big Fudge’s wife. Poor Jenkins.
8. Trudy
One of the biggest How I Met questions that will never be answered: did Ted have a threesome with Trudy and Rachel? Also, what’s the deal with that damn pineapple? The Mosby Boys might never crack that case, but it’s likely Ted never claimed the Threesome Belt, and dear god, what an awful story to tell your kids. Anyway, Trudy is such a normal, well-adjusted person that even Lily thinks she would have made a good wife for Ted. By that point, however, she was already married, and probably enjoying pineapple juice with her unseen-husband.
7. Quinn
I was never a huge fan of Quinn as a character (she was such an obvious stall to Barney ending up with Robin), but it’s unfair to think of her as crazy. If anything, she’s PROGRESSIVE, in the way people call every stripper who’s proud of her work PROGRESSIVE. Smartly exploiting men for thousands of dollars? Nothing crazy there.
6. Stella
TEAM ORIGINAL BECKY, I mean, Stella was confused, not crazy. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to end up with Ted or Tony, and she unfairly strung them along before coming to a final decision that wisely didn’t involve Ted. Then again, she didn’t enjoy Star Wars and refused to move to New York from New Jersey, so I’d immediately regret including her on this list, were it not for no-can-dosville, babydoll!
5. Janet
Janet and Ted agree to do the unthinkable: not Google (or Bing, haha, jk) each other before their date. Ted lives up to his side of the bargain for about 15 minutes, when he learns Janet graduated from Princeton at the age of 15, donated a kidney to a complete stranger, is the youngest woman to climb Mount Everest, saved a baby by rescuing him from a creek, inherited a billion-dollar fortune, and loves Annie Hall. The perfect woman! Except Janet finds out what Ted did, and leaves their date. La-di-da, la-di-da.
4. The Slutty Pumpkin
Before reuniting in 2011, all Ted knew about the Slutty Pumpkin was that she studied penguins (!) and created a drink that mixes Kahlúa with root beer, which she calls “The Tootsie Roll” (?). When they meet up a decade later, he learns her name, Naomi, but realizes that he’s fetishized their imaginary romance for too long. She feels the same way, and they leave each other hanging like a chad. Right place, wrong time.
3. Nora
The actress who played Nora, Nazanin Boniadi, was subjected to the craziness that is Scientology when she was vetted to become Tom Cruise’s wife. A brief excerpt: “The Vanity Fair article alleges she went through a month-long preparation that involved having to telling a Church official in-depth details about her sex life, as nobody who had been in a threesome could be considered. She was also told to get rid of her red highlights, have her braces removed and dump her current boyfriend. In the second month of their relationship, Cruise allegedly asked the actress to have her incisor teeth filed down and brought in his hairstylist to change her hair. She was allowed to finally tell her mother, also a Scientologist, that she was involved with Cruise.” So, by comparison, Nora, a laser tag-loving TV news producer, definitely passes the Hot/Crazy Scale.
2. Victoria
Before the Mother was officially introduced, Victoria was THE ONE who made the most sense for Ted. (In fact, when How I Met was on the verge of cancellation, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas planned it so that the show would end with Victoria becoming the titular mother.) Hell, any guy would be lucky to spend the rest of his life with a charming, beautiful baker who probably smells like cookies and cinnamon buns 24/7. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be, but Victoria will forever remain the cupcake of all the How I Met hookups: so sweet.
1. Cindy
Cindy > everyone but the Mother and Robin. Summer > Anna. So say we all.
