- How I Met Your Mother: The Bracket: It’s not difficult for me to hate characters like Barney from How I Met Your Mother. Last Monday’s episode, The Bracket, demonstrates it perfectly. It’s not a show I watch, for reasons Purtek highlighted in her review of another episode, and because I have no real desire to. I happened across five minutes of it last week, and sought out the full episode just to make sure what little I saw was as bad as I thought. That’s 20 ... READ MORE
- Women in Competition (How I Met Your Mother): A couple of weeks ago, on this thread, I mentioned that men are constantly portrayed as competing for women in a way that makes the woman essentially irrelevant. We use game metaphors to describe the system, but the winner and loser–the agents of participation–are always just the men. The women, I said, are the ball, the object you score with. How I Met Your Mother decided to construct an entire episode (“The Belt”) around proving this point for me, throwing in ... READ MORE
- How I Met Your Mother: Sauce for the Gander: How I Met Your Mother is normally a very entertaining show. It isn’t breaking any new ground, and certainly falls into standard TV demographics with its cast (all of the characters are young, white, professional, heterosexual, and of course photogenic), but it does usually feature excellent writing. One of the things that makes the writing so good is that most of the comedy is based on the peculiarities of the characters, rather than genre tropes. But there was an episode this ... READ MORE
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