F(l)o Show: How I Met Your Mother to finish after nine seasons

When the news came out today that How I Met Your Mother had been given a definite season finale date, there was probably no one as thankful as Ted Mosby’s children

After all, wouldn’t you be thankful if you’ve been listening to the same story go on and on for eight years?

CBS officially announced on Jan. 30 that season nine would be the final season of the show, and my immediate reaction was one of relief. I’m not even one of Ted’s poor children, but I fully sympathize with them, and have been ready for HIMYM to end for the past two or three seasons.

Not that I have anything against HIMYM. In fact, I loyally watch every week (mostly due to an unwillingness to just drop a show I’ve spent so much time on, as well as due to the occasional five-star episode) and have grown attached to most of the characters.

I simply think that every show has an expiration date if it doesn’t want to grow stale and lose the charm that had attracted viewers in the first place. HIMYM has long since passed said expiration date.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that every show has the exact same expiration date. Some shows have been going on for thirteen or even fourteen seasons, and they’re still going strong. Go them.

In general, though, it’s just sad when the writers of the shows you used to love start to run out of ideas and therefore resort to pulling desperate solutions out of thin air, just so they can produce another season that many original fans aren’t even going to watch anyway. That’s when we all wish that they’d just let the show fade gracefully from existence rather than bringing back things that no one is interested in any more (case in point: Ted’s crush on Robin? No one really cares about that anymore. Actually, no one cares about Ted anymore.)

I am of the opinion that this show should have ended two or three seasons ago. On a positive note, it seems as if the writers have been slowly working on closing out some storylines for a while now.

Given that the next season is to be the last one, I am hoping that Ted will meet the mother in the season finale in May and then spend the next season getting to know her. If we spent eight years building up to Ted meeting this woman, only to get a mere minute with her in the last bit of the show’s final episode, I would feel extremely cheated, and I’m sure Ted’s kids would too.

We want to get to know this woman who is apparently so important that Ted spends years and years going on about how he finally managed to find her. We want her to meet the gang, we want to find out the others’ impressions and opinions of her, and we want to see Ted stop his obsession over finding the perfect woman.

After eight years, we are finally ready to meet the mother, and with all this buildup, she had better be pretty incredible.

Don’t her poor children deserve that, after all these years?