A Comedy’s Final Twists Lead to Love and Ratings

A thousand and one nights came to an end in less than 60 minutes. “How I Met Your Mother” closed down on Monday with an hourlong finale crammed with all the deflection, distraction and guile that made this CBS comedy the Scheherazade of prime time.

The ending did have a surprise, after all. The last love of Ted (Josh Radnor) was not the mother of his children — though he did finally meet her early in the episode. In the final few moments, the story took several twists, all the way back to the pilot, when Ted fell for Robin (Cobie Smulders) and stole a blue French horn to impress her. On Monday night, Ted, gray-haired and six years a widower, raced to Robin’s window, brandishing the same French horn. The long-awaited, much-discussed mother, Tracy (Cristin Milioti), was a red herring.

And that was a denouement very much in keeping with the show’s patented balance of sentiment and sly self-awareness. The sweetness of friendships and love affairs on “How I Met Your Mother” was constantly undercut with ambitious comic experiments and riffs on the sitcom genre itself. The finale was too clever by half and still wholly satisfying.

“How I Met Your Mother” is a landmark show and not just because it had an ingenious premise or because it kept so many viewers, including younger ones, spellbound for almost a decade. It was a Johnny-come-lately successor to “Friends” that became so popular that it had its own legacy, including a planned CBS spinoff with an entirely new cast called “How I Met Your Dad.”

That didn’t seem likely when the show had its premiere in 2005, the same year that “The Colbert Report” began on Comedy Central, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” hit FX, and NBC took a chance with an American adaptation of the BBC mockumentary “The Office.” The Internet and premium cable were making so many innovations — and inroads — that any conventional prime-time sitcom seemed doomed to irrelevance.

The creators, Craig Thomas and Carter Bays, found inventive ways around the limits of the genre, bending sitcom conventions to their own comedy style and the tastes of viewers who were leaving network television for greener pastures. CBS made good use of a changing media landscape, putting reruns on FX and entire seasons on Netflix. It had a good cast with some breakout stars, like Jason Segel and Neil Patrick Harris, and that helped.

At the start, the show’s chief distinction was its complicated conceit: In 2030, a father is telling his two children the long, circuitous story of how he met their mother.

The narrative unfolded in a stop-start jumble of flashbacks and flash-forwards; the ensemble cast was a variation on the six-person template of “Friends.” “How I Met Your Mother” also starred three men and three women, only the third wasn’t seen or heard from until the finale of Season 8, when viewers, though not Ted, finally got a glimpse of the girl who would become the mother.

In Monday’s episode, Ted discovered her as she played in the band at the wedding of Robin and Barney (Mr. Harris), and fell in love at first sight. He worked up the nerve to talk to her at the Farhampton train station, and that was about it for them.

Most of the episode was taken up with snapshots from the passing years, including Robin and Barney’s later divorce and, in 2020, the birth of Barney’s baby girl, who was conceived during a one-night stand but who was, at long last, the real love of his life. Ted and Tracy are shown to have had a happy marriage, two children and a “Love Story” moment in a hospital ward.

And when Ted finally brought his story to a conclusion, his children, now teenagers, got the last word. They told him that he was obviously still in love with the woman they know as Aunt Robin and should follow his heart.

Romance-minded viewers should be satisfied, but the entire ninth season was less about Ted’s finally finding his true love than about a last chance for the writers to show off their virtuosity.

Face slapping was a recurring joke on the show. An episode titled “Slappointment in Slapmarra” was a high point of puns and inspired silliness, taking the characters on a mock odyssey to masters of martial arts in Shanghai and Cleveland.

And the most consistent theme of “How I Met Your Mother” was Ted’s cluelessness about his own heart, so the writers made the last episode a Rube Goldberg machine designed to keep his true love a secret from him as well as from viewers.

The success of “How I Met Your Mother” helped other shows put a contemporary spin on time-honored television comedy. And a little like the speed-talking “policy debate“ trend on college campuses, rapid repartee became almost as important as wit on shows about single friends, like “Happy Endings.”

It’s not easily done. The finale was followed by the premiere of “Friends With Better Lives,” a CBS show about three men and three women that, if you judge by the pilot, should be called “Friends With Worse Writers.” ABC is trying out its own high-concept comedy, “Mixology,” which throws together 10 characters in search of love in one bar on one night.

None of these new comedies seem fresh or inventive compared with “Silicon Valley,” which begins on HBO on Sunday, but then again, “How I Met Your Mother” also took time, and timing, to find its audience.