How I met Your Mother TV Show - Essay Example

How I met Your Mother TV Show Background of the Media Piece How I met your mother is an American sitcom thathas aired on CBS television from 19th September 2005 and has run for nine seasons with the final season beginning on 23rd September 2013. The show was made by carter bays and Craig Thomas who are also the executive producers of the show and also contribute on script writing on some of the scenes. Both Carter bays and Craig Thomas had been friends for a long time before teaming up to create this TV show. Both of them live in New York. The How I met your mother TV show has so far had 184 episodes and four different directors throughout the entire nine seasons. Pamela Fryman directed 172 episodes, Rob Greenberg directed seven episodes, Michael Shea has directed 4 episodes and Neil Patrick Harris has directed one episode of the show. How I met your mother is one of my favorite comedies of all time. I have watched the entire show from the first season to the current last season and it has never disappointed. I like its setting and the actors also help to bring out a great sense of humor to crack ones ribs. The show is centered on the main character, Ted Mosby, together with his friends living in Manhattan, New York. The show is set in the year 2030, where Ted Mosby recounts to his children, son and daughter, about the happenings that led to him meeting their mother before they got married. The show has relatively received positive reviews since its premiere episode and has become known for its eccentric humor and unique structure. This has enabled the show to garner a multitude of followers over the years that it has been showing. How I met your mother has won nine Emmy Awards and 28 nominations for the same awards. The show’s actress, Alyson Hannigan, was awarded the People’s Choice Award for being the favorite TV comedy actress in 2010. The show also won the People’s Choice Award for being the favorite comedy show on television network in 2012, 7 years after its debut episode. Neil Patrick Harris has also won the People’s Choice for being the most favorite TV comedy actor. The Pilot project for the show was shot at CBS Radford while each of the other episodes were shot at Soundstage Studio in Los Angeles over a period of three days. Each of the episodes includes at least fifty scenes. The laugh track of the show is later on recorded at a live audience that was shown in the final edited episode. The show’s theme song, ‘Hey Beautiful’ was composed by The Solids, a band that both Thomas and Bays are members. Production of the show was temporarily halted during the third season between during the strike of 2007-2008 involving the Writers Guild of America. The strike ended on 17th March, 2008 and production of the show’s episodes resumed with nine new episodes being shot. There was a slight change in the time slot for airing the show on CBS upon resuming production. The show flip- flopped with another sitcom, The Big Bang Theory during the summer and aired at 8:30pm ET/7:30PM CT. A fourth season was renewed by CBS in 2008 and premiered on 22ndd September, 2008. First Evaluation of the Show How I met your mother has received affirmative reviews from a majority of movie review sites and magazines across the world. The show has run for almost fifteen years and has a huge following, some of them who have also written different opinions about the show. The Guardian’s Anna Pickard is one of the movie reviewers for the newspaper and has thrown praise on the show. In her review article in The Guardian Newspaper titles, ‘How I met Neil Patrick Harris’, she praises the show and the actors as being one of the best shows in terms of its format and the comedy involved. She says the show is ‘clever’ and the fact that it has been set twenty years in to the future makes it more interesting for the jokes to set in (Anna, 2009). The characters in the show are also great and help to make the show even better by helping viewers to follow in their lives as they narrate their stories with a lot of comic involved (Anna, 2009). Anna Pickard says in the article that she had not liked the show and had been sick about it before she first got a DVD of the TV show from a friend (Anna Pickard, 2009). She changed her mind completely after watching it on the DVD and began following the show soon after that. She has gone to become one of the biggest fans of ‘How I met your mother’ TV show, according to her article in the Guardian (2009). She goes ahead to compare How I met your mother with other sitcoms such as Friends and gives her verdict that how I met your mother is way better than other sitcoms that are similar tom it. She ends her article by recommending her readers to watch the show and even goes ahead to give a few reasons as to why she thinks it is necessary for her readers to follow the show. Her reasons range from the likeable and lovely personality of the main actor Neil Harris Patrick to the format of the show (Anna, 2009). I personally concur with Anna Pickard about her opinion about the show. At first, for one who has never watched the program but has watched similar sitcoms, they would brush off the idea that it is a great show until when they lay their hands on it. After watching a few episodes, one will definitely fall in love with the show and become one of its biggest fans just like Anna Pickard did. I also agree with her that the show is very different from other common sitcoms on American TV and that it rightfully deserves to be one of the best comedies ever. I however differ with some of the reasons she gives to her readers to encourage them to follow the show, since some of the reasons stem from her obsession with the main character Neil Harris Patrick, and are not convincing enough for one to start watching the show. With all being said, the show is a great program. The Second Evaluation of the show After the premiere of the eighth season of how I met your mother, the ratings of the show fell down from 4.7 to 3.4 after a survey was conducted among viewers aged between 18-49 years (Erick Adams, 2012). Erick Adams of Av Club, a popular movie review website, wrote an article on the website criticizing the show and stating that it was about time the TV channel considered stopping to air the show after being very successful in previous years (Erick Adams, 2012). He said that viewers had lost taste of the show and that bays and Thomas ought to have way for other shows that would appeal to viewers (Erick, 2012). I do not agree with the sentiments brought out by Erick Adams in his article because despite the ratings of the show dropping on the premier of the eighth season, the show managed to attract a huge following as the season progressed. This prompted the produces to slot in a ninth season, which would be the final season of the show. A drop in the ratings at the time did not imply that the show had lost taste but it just meant that the viewers who had been questioned about the show did not like the program at the time. With subsequent episodes however, the situation was able to change. Conclusion Taking in mind the various different evaluations and reviews of the show, my opinion of the media piece, how I met your mother, is that the program is very great and enjoyable to watch. Having followed the program for a long time, I strongly believe that it is worth watching and it is sad that it is currently in its final season. Works Cited Anna Pickard. How I met Neil Harris Patrick, The Guardian, Online, 9th Setember, 2009, retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/culture/tvandradioblog/2009/sep/08/how-i-met-your- mother-e4 Accessed on 16th September 2013. Erick Adams. Ratings roundup: With ratings like these, maybe it is time How I Met Your Mother met The Mother, AV Club, online, 25th September, 2012, retrieved from http://www.avclub.com/articles/ratings-roundup-with-ratings-like-this-maybe-it- is,85372/ accessed on 16th September, 2013. Read More