List of How I Met Your Mother characters. From left to right: Ted, Robin, Barney, Marshall, Lily. The American sitcom How I Met Your Mother premiered on CBS on September 1. Created by Craig Thomas and Carter Bays, the show is presented from the perspective of Ted in 2.
The show lasted for nine seasons and 2. March 3. 1, 2. 01. The main characters are: Ted Mosby, a romantic searching for . Although the show is based around The Mother, her first appearance is not until the season 8 finale.
Does How I Met Your Mother’s finale ruin it for all time? How I Met Your Mother is a comedy about Ted (Josh Radnor) and how he fell in love. It all starts when Ted's best friend, Marshall (Jason Segel), drops the bombshell. Watch How I Met Your Mother Season 9 episodes online with help from SideReel. We connect you to show links, recaps, reviews, news and more.
How I Met Your Mother may finally get that CBS spinoff. Deadline reports the network is interested in the new series project How I Met Your Father.
Many of the main character's relatives appear throughout the show, such as Lily's father or Barney's brother. They may also be seen in family gatherings, such as Barney and Robin's wedding or Marshall's father's funeral. Ted's children and Marvin W. Eriksen (son of Marshall and Lily) appear in the background of many episodes without being crucial to many plots. Ranjit, Carl the Bartender and several other characters often appear because they work in places the main cast frequent (such as Mac. Laren's Pub). Characters in relationships with Ted, Barney or Robin often appear in several episodes within a short period of time, such as Victoria, Nora or Kevin. Minor characters such as the Slutty Pumpkin or Mary the Paralegal may only appear in one or two episodes but still play a crucial role in the episodes they are in.
Notes: ^1 . Eriksen has been played by several actors, some uncredited, at different ages varying from babyhood to adulthood. Main characters. He is a romantic, originally searching for . Ted grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio with parents Virginia Mosby and Alfred Mosby. He is an architect who graduated from Wesleyan University, where he met Marshall and Lily. Ted also serves as the show's narrator from the future, voiced by Bob Saget, as he tells his children a detailed story, with the premise of explaining how he met their mother. A brief history of Ted includes being left at the altar, taking a job as an architecture professor and designing the new headquarters for Goliath National Bank. Ted has dated many people and been in several long- term relationships.
Ted has an on- again, off- again relationship with Robin. Ted also dated Victoria, Stella, Zoey and Jeanette. Ted finally gets to meet his wife- to- be, Tracy, on the day of Barney and Robin's wedding, after accidentally teaching one of her college classes, owning her yellow umbrella for a short time, and dating her roommate.
When he ran into Tracy's roommate (Cindy), it led to Tracy's band performing at Barney and Robin's wedding. In the finale, it is discovered his wife died six years earlier. His children claim his story was not about their mother but about Robin; they urge him to get back together with her and he does, bringing the iconic blue French horn with him. Robin Scherbatsky. She is originally from Vancouver, British Columbia and is a fan of the Vancouver Canucks.
Robin was named after her father, who she has some issues with as he wanted a male child. She and Ted have an on- again, off- again relationship there was some sexual tension between them throughout the third season, most obviously when Robin brought home her boyfriend Gael from a trip to Argentina.
The subject of four episodes, Robin was a teen pop singer named Robin Sparkles. Her first boyfriend was Simon, who starred in her second music video. In season 4, Robin moves in with Ted after leaving her short- lived job in Japan.
Though she has stated explicitly that she does not like children, Future Ted mentioned that she eventually grew to like them and even became close to Ted's children. After being unemployed for a while, Robin found out that she would be deported from America if she did not get a job.
Barney helped her land a job for an early morning show in . Soon after she started she got a co- host named Don whom she originally disliked. However, she grew to like him and they dated for a while. It is revealed in the season 7 finale that Robin married Barney. They divorce after three years of marriage. In 2. 03. 0, Robin is shown to be living with her dogs in New York when she gets asked out by Ted, a six- year widower by then. Barney Stinson. He is known for wearing suits, playing laser tag, performing magic tricks, and overusing catchphrases such as .
Barney is the writer of the Bro Code and the Playbook, documenting rules for best friends (. He spent very little time with his father as a child. In season 6, Barney's father Jerome returns to his life hoping to make amends for abandoning him as a child. As a young adult, Barney was a long- haired hippie with plans to join the Peace Corps. Watch The Lion Cub From Harrods Putlocker# here. Soon after his rejection, he saw a flier for a sale on suits, thus beginning his suit addiction. Shortly after, he met Ted Mosby at a urinal and announced that he would . The two get together in season 5, but the relationship is short- lived.
After their breakup, Barney returns to one- night stands, but sometimes shows regret in ending his relationship with Robin. Barney and Nora have a brief relationship, but it ends because Barney is unwilling to let himself be honest with her about his feelings.
Later, they get back together but Barney cheats on Nora with Robin. However, Barney and Robin get divorced in 2.
Barney goes back to having one- night stands, and eventually impregnates a woman. The birth of his daughter, Ellie, effectively causes him to change his ways for good. Lily Aldrin. She is married to Marshall and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Like Ted and Marshall, she is a graduate of Wesleyan University and dreams of being an artist; she has painted naked paintings of Marshall and Barney.
Lily has a huge debt problem because of her impulsive shopping; she is able to hide this from Marshall until they apply for a mortgage in . She is very manipulative, having caused several of Ted's relationships to end when she disliked his date. It has been shown many times that she cannot keep a secret, with a few exceptions: she hides her second pregnancy and keeps Ted's move to Chicago a secret from everyone but Marshall. Another ongoing joke in the show is her implied bisexuality. Prior to college, Lily dated Scooter. At college, she met Ted and started dating Marshall.
She and Marshall were together for 9 years and engaged for almost a year before Lily broke up with Marshall to move to San Francisco for a summer to concentrate on her art. Marshall was so hurt that they stayed separated for a few months after she returned to New York. They eventually get married at the end of season 2. They move into an apartment in . They consider children for years before feeling . Lily announces in the season 6 finale that she is pregnant and their first child was revealed to be male in . In the episode . In season eight, Lily accepts a job as The Captain's art consultant.
The Captain later asks her to move to Italy to search for and purchase artwork for his collection; she and Marshall agree to move there. However, this is the cause of disagreement between the couple for most of the season when Marshall accepts an offer to be a judge without consulting Lily. Lily is revealed to be pregnant with a second child in . Marshall Eriksen. Born in 1. 97. 8, Marshall met Ted and Lily during their freshman year at Wesleyan University. He and Lily began dating during college and got married at the end of season 2. Marshall is a Columbia Law School graduate originally from Minnesota.
Even though he stands at 6 ft 4 in (1. Marshall became a lawyer because he was interested in environmental protection laws. He accepts a job at a corporate law firm, before joining the legal team at Goliath National Bank, where Barney also works. Marshall is also very good at various games and believes in the paranormal, specifically Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster. It is revealed in . In early 2. 01. 1, after being told Marshall and Lily are capable of having a baby, Marshall's dad has a fatal heart attack and dies. For several months after this, he is upset and his friends make an effort to be nicer to him.
His first son, born in the episode .
How I Met Your Mother ? The popular (and proper) answer to this is no. Any TV show worth its salt understands that the age of endless Internet chatter about TV series overvalues endings in the grand scheme of things. The pleasure—particularly in a sitcom—is all in the journey. And that should be more than true for How I Met Your Mother, a series that was all about how the journey turns you into the person who is ultimately worthy of love when the right person finally lands in your life.
And yet the show’s series finale is a strange beast, one that tries to serve all masters, both suggesting that life is not fair and has no happy endings and yet grafts a happy ending onto the end of that message, as if the series abruptly remembered it was a sitcom. Though the finale can’t invalidate the pleasures of the show’s run—particularly its first four years and substantial portions of seasons five through seven—it does create the impression that the series’ creators were telling a vastly different story from the one they seemed to be, and it provides the ending for a story that much of the audience wasn’t aware it was even supposed to be watching. Does it ruin the show?
But it’ll make it play more strangely in syndicated reruns. The ultimate takeaway from the final season is that series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas were at once too good and not good enough to tell the story they ultimately wanted to tell. In the former category comes the fact that the pair are terrific at casting and can absolutely nail emotional moments, like when series protagonist Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) meets Tracy (Cristin Milioti), the woman he will marry, in the rain at a train platform. Both the introduction of Milioti to the series’ cast—which felt increasingly tiny with every passing season—and the way the scenes between her and Radnor were written gave the show a vital shot of life. Similarly, Bays and Thomas, as well as their writing staff and series director Pamela Fryman, spent almost all of the final two seasons trying to convince the audience that playboy Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) and Ted’s former girlfriend Robin (Cobie Smulders) were right for each other, culminating in a lovely scene of naked emotion from Barney, in which he insists he’s done lying and playing games. He wants Robin and only Robin.
This is all well and good if the story the series is telling is that of the show’s title. But it’s not. The story the series ultimately settled on was that of not just how Ted met Tracy (and told his kids all about not just that but also several seemingly unconnected adventures) but also how his kids told him to get out of his own head and start fucking Robin again after his wife had been dead for a socially acceptable period of time.
And this isn’t something Bays and Thomas pulled out of their ass to give a series that ran too long a happy ending! One of the key scenes of the episode is Ted’s kids telling him to run off and pursue Robin, and that scene was filmed early in the show’s run, when the actors were still young enough to believably portray teenagers. Ted’s endless attempts to rekindle his romance with Robin, say, or the creators’ unwillingness to introduce the Mother before the final season (and then their reluctance to use her in this last run of episodes) are re- contextualized not as a series revisiting story material out of desperation, but as the show trying to prime the audience for an ending the creators did a terrible job of laying the groundwork for. Bays and Thomas simply looked like shitty long- term planners, unable to understand that getting the audience so invested in the Barney and Robin coupling or in Tracy as a character would make it all the harder when the series finale abruptly dissolved the former and treated the latter’s death as an aside in the narration. That the show never seemed to suggest Ted mourned her feels like a vital betrayal of his character.
In some ways, it’s easy to sympathize with the way the creators tried to hold onto a speeding train and eventually got thrown off; in others, it becomes all the more baffling that they didn’t find a way to better foreshadow much of this or underline the way the show was apparently meant to be about how people will have many great loves in their lives, not just the one. Nerdlove calls “Oneitis,” the inability to see past a certain person to anyone else who might be an even better fit.) Bays and Thomas try to save this with a climactic monologue about how important love is, but it fits in with the finale’s general sense of being a hodgepodge or scrapbook of moments, rather than having the courage to simply sit back and let the images and dialogue tell the story. Even stranger is the fact that the season’s overarching structure—taking place almost entirely on Barney and Robin’s wedding weekend—contained some of the most poignant and beautiful moments in the history of the show, poignant and beautiful moments that were summarily undone by the finale’s refusal to stick with what it had done. The rushed finale also makes the decision to set the finale over the compressed timeframe of just one weekend much more problematic, since the season’s early episodes devoted to mostly stupid bullshit (like whether Robin’s or Barney’s mom can make better eggs, or whom Ted will hook up with at the wedding) pale in comparison to the heart- wrenching stuff in the last few.
To be sure, Bays and Thomas were working with an ungainly 2. But what might have played like a fun gimmick episode told in rhyme if the finale had been perfect (or even just very good) feels all the more like a waste now. Yet if the series finale has made much of the season preceding it play slightly worse in retrospect, it’s not enough to overwrite so much of what was one of the best comedies of its era, especially at the start. It’s not enough to erase the slap bets and best burgers in New York and two- minute dates of the show’s run, nor is it enough to eliminate stories that came later in the show’s run, like, say, Marshall losing his dad while Barney is finding his. There was so much beauty and so much wonder at both the passage of time and the seeming inevitability of the way those of us lucky enough to be blessed by love are able to find it that it would be impossible for even a far worse finale to invalidate the series entirely. What’s more, big swing series finales are often remembered more enthusiastically with the passage of time—with the already spoiled watching the show and the ability to consume it all over a few months rather than a decade. It’s entirely possible “Last Forever” will join the last episodes of St.
Elsewhere and The Sopranos among the company of divisive finales that eventually won many adherents. But think back to the wonderful ending of the show’s pilot, to the moment when Ted’s kids realize the woman he met was their Aunt Robin, not their mother, and think about all that has been lost in the quest by Bays and Thomas to write themselves out of that moment, even when several viable alternatives presented themselves.
The series finale of How I Met Your Mother insists that life happens to you, like it or not, that the bad things can’t be swept away in a single moment. It’s a pity that the men writing it tried so hard to stick to those guns once it became evident how far the show had trended away from their original plans. Series grade: B+Created by: Carter Bays and Craig Thomas. Starring: Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris, Alyson Hannigan, Cristin Milioti.
Aired: Monday at 8 p. Eastern on CBS. Format: Half- hour multi- camera sitcom. Entire series watched for review. Other season grades: Season 1: A- Season 2: ASeason 3: A- Season 4: ASeason 5: BSeason 6: B+Season 7: BSeason 8: CSeason 9: C+.