Earlier this year at Comic-Con, Josh Radnor, the star of CBS's How I Met Your Mother, that in his mind the series has always been at the forefront of innovative sitcom structure. The show, which has essentially extended one storyline for what will be nine seasons — its final one premiering tonight — premiered in 2005, a year before 30 Rock solidified flashback and flash-forward irreverence cultivated on Arrested Development and Family Guy as the standard for smart comedy.

"We really introduced some stuff that is now kind of commonplace in some ways, and I was actually talking with [creators] Carter [Bays] and Craig [Thomas] last night about how there's this new fashion of dumping twelve episodes, like Netflix, giving all these episodes, and they can do really serialized arcs," Radnor said. "And that's what Carter and Craig excel at. The network, initially, was like, 'Do more standalone episodes. We want people to just tune in and be able to watch the show.' I feel like in some ways we just did what we did really well and the public mood kind of caught up to us."

The initial premise of How I Met Your Mother was clever enough — a father tells his kids the story of how he met their mother, but continually gets derailed — but that plot device has also frustrated viewers as the creators have toyed viewers by only offering tiny hints about the mother like a recurring yellow umbrella and a shot of her ankle. This last season will supposedly wrap up the seemingly never-ending tale, but even if viewers are skeptical, looking back over the past eight seasons, there really are so many things How I Met Your Mother has done effectively. Sure, the creators have drawn out some plot lines a little too far and Ted's urgency to find a wife borders on desperate, but the series ultimately stands up as a clever, narratively interesting show that deserves its place in the television history logbooks.

Much of today's TV comedy is based on asides, quick flash-out shots that illuminate the present situation more fully. Family Guy's humor has been almost entirely based in this trend. But while shows like Family Guy and 30 Rock have amplified the device, How I Met Your Mother is the mainstream network show that has most successfully balanced quirky aside humor with a grand, serialized narrative arc. In that way, Radnor is right about the show's ability to transform the traditional sitcom structure and implement a new means of storytelling.

As the main storyline of How I Met Your Mother has taken a backseat, the show has dealt with the real life events that come from friends marrying and having kids, including the death of a parent. Silliness has pervaded as well, but largely How I Met Your Mother finds its grounding in reality, balancing sincerity with that unrealistic comedic levity. The show has addressed what it means to grow up, from being a young twenty-something in New York City to an adult with a home, a career, and children. Plenty of other series have contemplated these same life events in a similar form (Friends, Sex and the City, etc.), but How I Met Your Mother seems to be the only one with an end game specified in the pilot. The entire nine seasons ultimately center on the question "Just how did Ted meet these kids' mother?" In the end, the true measure of success for the series will be how well the creators can answer this question. As we've seen from shows like Lost, setting yourself up for a satisfying conclusion to a serialized arc is tricky, especially if the realization of the entire collection of episodes then becomes contingent on that ending.

"[The show] just gathered all this momentum," Radnor said during Comic-Con. "It was quiet for those first few years, but I also had this confidence that it was just too good not to stick around... I feel like by the end you're at the top of the mountain and you say — wow, we got to do some incredibly strange, amazing moments of television because in some ways people weren't paying that much attention at first."

How I Met Your Mother has clearly done so many effective things in terms of storytelling, but will we feel differently if the series finale falters in any way, especially now that everyone is paying attention? Or will it be enough to just see Ted's poor kids get to leave the couch where they've been sitting for so long?



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