Episode 14 - The Possimpible
4 February 2009
Review
Synopsis: Robin gets fan mail forwarded from Metro News One. It includes a letter from US immigration about her visa expiring. She has seven days to find a job. Barney offers to help create a more flamboyant reel for her and eventually it gets her a new job. In the meantime she gives up hope after being rejected from hosting the lottery draw. Her search for work leads to Marshall, Lily and Ted revisiting their own resumes and the embarrassing things on them.
The Good: I kind of enjoyed the campy lottery guys who weren’t impressed with Robin’s audition (see Comic Highlight).
The Bad: Here’s one of the problems with How I Met Your Mother. Generally speaking, all the action we see is in flashbacks which spring from conversations the group have while sitting together in the bar or in Ted’s apartment. So aside from drinking, we never see the characters doing anything normal. We don’t really know them well. We know that Frasier likes the finer things, Jerry Seinfeld likes Superman and his cereal, Joey (Friends) likes sandwiches and watching Baywatch. These are basic things which build the sense that the characters you are watching are real people. We even know that JD (Scrubs) likes old sitcoms, Liz Lemon (30 Rock) likes unhealthy snack food and Dwight Schrute (The Office), well, there are so many things.
But for Ted and company we don’t really see it. We don’t know what they eat most days, we don’t know how they pass the time, we don’t really know much about who they are. What we do know is an endless stream of new facts about their pasts. The problem with these facts is that they have so obviously been made up for the episode they appear in that they don’t flow from the characters personalities. The writers are building back stories for these characters which don’t fit their personalities at all. This is not a new phenomenon either. For example Lily’s huge credit card debt (307) came out of nowhere and has been barely mentioned since.
This episode is an example of what happens when this tendency to build backwards really fails to create any sense of reality. Marshall’s “dancers hip” is the worst kind of story. We have never seen Marshall dance around and they don’t even show a flashback of him dancing, so it comes across as entirely fabricated. But we are not only asked to believe he dances around so much he could injure himself doing it but that Lily had no idea he ever danced. This is the couple who tell each other literally everything (220, 413). If we are supposed to believe that is true then how could Marshall have such a big secret? It doesn’t make sense and doesn’t feel authentic.
Similarly Robin’s bungling attempts to ad-lib a cool sign-off phrase just don’t sound like her. She carries herself very self confidently and we have no reason to believe she would give in to the pressure in this barely believable fashion. Lily being able to eat so many hot dogs doesn’t fit her skinny, fashion conscious personality either. The joke is only written so that she can show off her pregnant belly (in real life Alyson Hannigan is pregnant). I don’t understand the philosophy behind that decision. The joke is that the actress is pregnant and ha ha we wrote that into the story in a silly way. I will ignore the stupidity of it (implying her belly would actually expand just from stuffing hot dogs down her throat) and just ask how reminding us that this is a television show makes it funnier? I suppose some will laugh at the sheer sillyness but what is really going on is further divorcing the show from any sense of reality.
Barney’s campy video resume is over the top and doesn’t have an obvious joke to it. If the writers were genuinely satirising corporate America then it might have some humour value but as it is, its just too silly to be plausible. Barney doing voice and sing-overs makes it look more fake not more funny. Ted being surprised by Barney’s ridiculous video is almost as weird as the video itself. Why is Ted the least bit surprised by Barney doing something so flamboyant and seemingly ridiculous? Where has he been for the last four years? And why on earth did Barney think Robin could break bricks with her forehead? That was just mindless writing.
We get a nice dose of some other inauthentic How I Met Your Mother specials too. Barney’s opening commentary to the lottery numbers is of course far too smooth to look like he was ad-libbing. The jokes themselves were eye rolling clichés too. Then we have everyone getting their heavily scripted jibes in at Marshall for contracting “dancer’s hip.” Anyone knows that when your friends insult you they don’t craft too-cute and too-witty one-liners to try and zing you with. They just mock you in simple or silly ways. The lines don’t even fit the characters. Would a wife ever make a joke about her husband “going to the gyno”? Lily is pretty much insulting herself with that line making it doubly weird. Lily’s acting again falls short when she guffaws it up in the doctor’s office. Ugh.
The conclusion to the story is so lame and so predictable, I was surprised it could be so bad. Barney walks in and of course he sent Robin’s resume to all the stations in the city and got her a job. Not only a job but the anchor of Channel 12’s new morning talk show. Without an interview of course. It’s such a clichéd and easy end to the story. If Robin had gone along with Barney’s way the whole time then we could have seen them bonding and get an insight into what makes him successful. But no. What’s really sad is that just before he arrives Robin tells the others how sad she is to leave New York and how her friends in Canada all believed in her. It’s plausible, its well acted and well written. This cast are capable of playing straight roles well but they get precious little chance to show it.
There’s no discussion between Ted and Barney about Robin leaving which seems like a missed opportunity now that Ted knows how Barney feels about her.
Comic Highlight: Robin comes to audition for the lottery show and the two campy guys there take it all very seriously. They act well together (as one whispers constantly to the other one) and convincingly take their own product very seriously even though to the audience it seems like such a frivolous show. When Robin says “Seventeen” they stop her and one says to the other “Why did she say it like that? It’s like she isn’t even happy about the seventeen coming up. She seems mean.” She tries it again and he says “I don’t even understand what she’s doing!”
How I rate your episode: I believe comedy flows best from characters with established personalities being put in new situations. Not new pasts being created for characters without properly established personalities. Or to put it another way, this sucks.
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