This post will be full of spoilers. I would normally say "don't read this if you haven't watched it," but to be honest, my recommendation is that no one watch the final season. This season should be buried beneath Yucca Mountain so that no human accidentally stumbles into it. So I don't mind spoiling it.
First, some background and some speculation. Jason Segel, one of the five main actors on the show, decided to quit after season 8 so that he could focus on his film career. All the other actors wanted to stay on for a 9th season, and eventually convinced Jason Segel to stay along as well. I'm guessing that convincing him looked something like this:
This conflict and its resolution lead to one of the major problems with the 9th season (and this is where I am speculating): lack of funds. The production value of the season is just absurdly low. Distractingly bad greenscreens are omnipresent, even for settings where previous seasons used sets. Did they lose those sets over summer break or something? The entire season is shot like a bottle episode, with probably 80% of the non-greenscreened screentime taking place at one location. What little money they had was apparently thrown at guest stars. Pretty much anyone who had ever appeared in the series made a guest appearance in the final season. Big, expensive names like Bryan Cranston popped in for cameos that didn't add much. Even people with no connection to the show, like a random song by Boyz II Men. It just looks like they had no idea how to allocate their money wisely.
The show was contracted to end with season 8, but then halfway through that season, they negotiated to make a 9th. This lead to some major problems with pacing in the 9th season. We learned earlier in the show that Ted met The Mother at Barney and Robin's wedding. The entire 8th season built up to the wedding, and ended with all the main characters on their way to a bed and breakfast for a 3 day weekend leading up to the wedding itself. There were two choices of how to handle season 9 with that setup:
- Have the wedding take up the first episode (or even the first few, since a lot is going on). Ted meets The Mother, and the rest of the season is them falling in love, courting, etc.
- Stretch the wedding over 22 excruciating episodes, culminating in Ted meeting The Mother
They, sadly, opted for the latter. They changed the format of the show by making the entire season a single serialized story, rather than a mostly episodic array of stories with longer arcs buried in subplots, as in previous seasons. I'm not opposed to serial story telling, but this team was not used to telling stories that way, and their inexperience shows. The episodes are padded to the point where they feel about 20 minutes too long.
Not only does the pacing problem mean we spend too much time being bored at the wedding (which, granted, adds some realism), but it necessarily means that we don't spend that time elsewhere. So we drag through that awful wedding and then gloss over some really interesting things in the last two or three episodes. I said this before, but now I mean it. Major spoilers lie ahead.
Robin and Barney end up getting divorced (after we invested literally hours of our lives watching them get married). I don't mind that they did, but I hate the way the writers made it happen. They got in one fight (over the availability of WiFi, no less) and the next scene they're telling everyone they got divorced.
The same happens when The Mother dies. We see a 3 second shot of her in a hospital bed and I must have missed the narrator telling us she died, because I wasn't sure of it until a few minutes later. Again, I don't mind that she died. This show handles serious topics like death semi-regularly, but it's the glossing over it that I mind. We wasted hours learning that the room that Marshall and Lilly stayed in was haunted, but we can't spare a few moments when The Mother - one of two characters named in the title of the show - dies?
Related to that last point, I have one more gripe about pacing and time allocation. They did a huge disservice to the character of The Mother with all of this. She was in the show so little that we didn't care about her. I know that this was intentional (because Ted was really in love with Robin). But the fact that it was intentional doesn't make it good story telling. When Marshall's Dad died, it was poignant and heartbreaking. When The Mother died, I was only sad that she didn't take Ted out with her. They didn't give us a chance to care about that character, and that is really a shame.
In the end, my big problem with this season was that they tried for a mix of touching and funny (again, like when Marshall's dad died) but ended up just being depressing. Barney gets married but loses his wife and ends up grasping for meaning in his bastard child. Ted and The Mother look bored and depressed any time they're on screen. I'm not sure if that's because the life choices Ted has made have left him in a miserable marriage or because the actors are sick of the bad writing. After years of pretending to love his wife, Ted hooks up with his best friend's ex wife and thinks that will make him happy. What a great end to such a fun romp!
Blech. After we watched it, Kate and I were so depressed that we had to chase with the Venture Brothers. I recommend you do the same.
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