TV Time

Well, I didn't go for the walk in the sunshine yesterday. The soccer parents got an e-mail from the team's manager asking for a parent or two to hang around throughout the practice, as one of the coaches had his tires slashed in the parking lot last week.


Do you know what this means? It means I had an excuse to sit on my ass! OF COURSE I didn't mind staying at the field through the whole practice--I am *very* good at sitting for 90 minutes, after all.


That doesn't mean that I didn't take time to appreciate my life, however, because I mean business about that. Want to know what I did? I took my laptop and spent most of the hour-and-a-half watching episodes from the first season of How I Met Your Mother on DVD (there is something to be said for watching TV sitting on a blanket outside). The first season is something like 22 episodes on three DVDs, and I've now made it through the first two. I got the set from the library and it's due back soon, so I'm hoping to get through the last episodes by Saturday.


I haven't watched a sit-com with any regularity since Friends, so I don't know what else is out there and what I might be missing, but I think HIMYM is very well done. My Friends memories are pretty hazy, especially if I try to think back to the first season, but I think I can argue that HIMYM is better all around. The writing is better, the acting is better . . . the Friends cast was relatively new to TV, if I remember correctly (I think the only ones I'd seen before were Chandler and Monica, whose real names I can't remember . . . wait . . . Courtney Cox and . . . not David Schwimmer, not Matt LeBlanc, WHAT is his NAME? I've been trying to rely less on Google, and I don't want to look it up . . . MATTHEW PERRY!!!!!!!!!! Thank GOD! Matthew Perry!).


Ahem. I've been worried about early-onset Alzheimer's brought on by the use of anti-anxiety medicine, so things like this are kind of a big deal. Forgive me.


SO. HIMYM. Where was I? Oh, yes: The cast. How can you go wrong with Jason Segel (Freaks & Geeks) and Alyson Hannigan (Buffy)? You can't. And Neil Patrick Harris*! He's brilliant at being attractive and repulsive at the same time, and I love him. I hadn't seen the other two principals before, but they do more than hold their own with their more experienced cast mates. I even love Bob Saget as the voice of Future Ted, who--in the year 2030--is telling his son and daughter the story of . . . how he met their mother. [I will admit that I harbor tender feelings for the cast of Full House (aside from Dave Coulier--I never liked that Joey for a minute).]


HIMYM called itself a love story in reverse. It's about friends and love and relationships and all the stuff Friends was about, but it seems more real to me, which I think is weird, since I was nearly the same age as the Friends characters, and am a good ten years older than the HIMYM characters . . . but maybe that's why it works better? Because (in my best crone voice) it's nice to see what the young people are up to these days?


Sigh.


Whatever. I know I'm late to the party, and that that show has enough awards to prove its worth without my endorsement, but it's funny and clever and sometimes sweet without being cloying, and it's just good TV about characters you can actually care about. If you haven't seen it and your library has the DVDs, I recommend it.


One final thing: I can't decide whether it's better to take the approach of my secret boyfriend, David Foster Wallace, and riddle my posts with footnotes for all of my digressions, as with the Neil Patrick Harris remark below, or to keep stuffing things into parentheses. If you have an opinion, I'd like to hear it.



*I'm not sure why he plays the same sort of role when he's playing himself in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Is it because he's gay and playing hard against stereotype? Or playing hard to mock a straight stereotype? But I suppose that's an investigation for another post.