How I Met Your Mother: Season 6

I'm of two mindsets on this sixth season of How I Met Your Mother. The more agitated and negative one is still reeling from the ultimate pointlessness of the entire season for the most part. Ted met, courted, dated, and then broke it off with yet another woman who we knew all along would not be the titular mother. Barney dealt with daddy issues and began the process of learning to settle down with one woman, even though he'd done the latter thing in the early part of Season 5. Marshall and Lily tried to get pregnant, but couldn't, but then did in the season finale. And Robin... was there. But interestingly enough the prevailing mindset for me is the more positive one. "Eh. They wasted a lot of time on a pointless relationship, but so what? Several of the episodes were duds, but that's always been the case. The writing staff sure was spinning their wheels, but there's some forward momentum to take us into next season and beyond." Granted, that positive mindset may be more beaten into apathy than truly optimistic, but it's still the one I'm walking away from Season 6 with. The earlier negative one? That's the one I had a year ago when I "walked out on" Season 6 right in the middle of it (ie, deleted the series recording order from my DVR). There are two conclusions to be made here. One is that the sixth season sucked at first and then got a lot better. The other is that this show works best when devoured on DVD rather than seen live, twenty minutes a week at a time. My money is on the latter being true. After all, I thought Season 5 started out so-so and ended very poorly, and that lines up with the fact that I watched the first half all at once before catching up to the second half, which I watched live. So I'm left with the same takeaway now that I was left with a year ago - that How I Met Your Mother is a show best seen in multiple-hour chunks. That's actually kind of rare for a comedy, and many shows that I watch on TV every week for laughs are shows I'd be hard-pressed to revisit on DVD in marathon sessions. But then, How I Met Your Mother is far more emotion-driven than most sitcoms, even if it's shot with multiple cameras, contains a laugh track, and airs on CBS. Lost in all of this theorizing I'm doing is the fact that the show is now more than six years old, and that it's actually pretty hard for a show to keep churning out fresh material when all the pieces have been in place for so long. It's an easy joke that becomes more true every year that the show should be called How I Spent the Years Before I Met Your Mother instead, but that's widely accepted as being beside the point by now. The parts of this show that work don't necessarily work because they push us toward the point where we find out who the mother is, and the parts that don't work don't necessarily not work because they put Ted in non-mother relationships or find other ways to stall. No, simply put, certain episodes are funny and interesting, and certain episodes are meaningful and relevant to the big picture overall, and certain episodes resonate emotionally. And sometimes an episode hits right at the center of this triple Venn diagram, and sometimes an episode misses every mark entirely. Watching every episode in a season over the course of a few days, it's easy to forgive the duds and remember the highlights; watching every episode over a nine month stretch, the stink of those duds lingers much longer. In other words, although it's tempting right now to race off to the Internet and watch the first half of Season 7 and catch up once again with the show, I know that after two consecutive iffy March episodes, I'd abandon ship all over again; it'll be another six months at least before I find out what comes next for these five characters, but at least I can assume it'll be a whole lot of stuff relatively similar to the stuff that's happened to them for six years and counting now.