Role Reversal

Sles has had it up to here with Balloo’s shenanigans…

The Legend of POWSO: Ocarina of Fanboys

The POWSO crew recounts and recites some of their favorite video game music. Tea and crumpets are not served, but insults are hurled.

The POWSO, the Duel and the Fallen

Gerry returns from a road trip as Thomas makes his next move in his diabolical scheme to destroy the POWSO team.

How HIMYM Schools J.J. Abrams

When I sat down to write this article initially, I was wholly prepared to rip How I Met Your Mother a new asshole (or, more accurately, discuss some misgivings I had about the show but concede that I would continue to watch it). In fact, I wrote a whole first draft doing just that. I expounded on its insensitivity toward its characters and its avoidance of tough, emotional issues. Then I did what a smart person would do writing a highly critical article about a television show: I actually watched the whole thing. Specifically, I watched the next two episodes of the season I was on. The two major critiques I had with HIMYM were both immediately addressed – one for each episode. It goes without saying that I felt a little sheepish after that. HIMYM had effectively bitch slapped me back into my place, but for that, I am proud. It made me realize that HIMYM is doing everything that every show on television should be doing, but isn’t. Allow me to explain.

Originally, I was going to row on HIMYM for its treatment of two particular subplots, the first of which was Marshall and his career path. Marshall Erikson, played by the ever-nude Jason Segel (see what I did there? Arrested Development? Jason Segel’s always naked? Amirite?) is in graduate school to become a lawyer for the earlier portion of the show. It’s established relatively early on that his dream job is to work for the NRDC (the National Resources Defense Council, if you’re unfamiliar) and fight for the preservation of the environment. It’s also established relatively early on that this job will not make him very much money. To make a long story short, Marshall ends up abandoning his admirable occupational aspirations to work for a slimy corporate company for a larger paycheck that he feels would ultimately benefit him and his new wife, Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan). He does this even though he knows he will end up hating it there.

When I saw this, I threw my hands up in the air and called shenanigans for the length of a 1500 word article, asserting that HIMYM had just doomed one of my favorite characters to a life of misery without a second thought. It was as if the writers expected me to just laugh it off and I just had to make peace with that fact that abandoning your morals is just a compromise “grown ups” make in life. That is, until about three episodes later when Marshall quit his job because he acknowledged that “he was working for the bad guys”. I put my hands down and deleted about three paragraphs from my article.

The second subplot that got me steamed had to do with Marshall’s wife Lily and her painting career. Lily, as the show explains, is a kindergarten teacher, but always wanted to be a painter. She took the job so that she and Marshall could have a steady income while he was finishing graduate school, and effectively abandoned her painting career as a result. At one point in the show, Lily goes through a career crisis in which she tries on several job hats, only to finally settle back into her kindergarten career, nursing her disappointment over not being able to be a painter with a shopping addiction. I was similarly up-in-arms about this. I felt that HIMYM was suggesting that the status quo was meant to be sustained and any attempts to pursue interests outside the established was a naïve endeavor. The fact that Lily nursed her broken heart over her broken dreams with designer shoes was all the more unsettling.

Until, of course, HIMYM readdressed the topic – something I didn’t think it would do. Lily discovers that her paintings aren’t very popular with people, but that they do have a very profound connection with the dog demographic (they sort of mesmerize them and make them docile). Marshall helps her sell her paintings to veterinarians, and Lily is finally able to say that she’s made something of a career from her art. I then deleted my entire article and a single tear of happiness rolled down my cheek.

I realized in retrospect that my immediate condemnation of the initial turn these subplots took came from the assumption that the writers had made a decision for those character, regardless of their previous desires or morals, and that that was the end of it. I’ll admit that I was quick to judge and I am glad to be proven wrong. But I feel that my inclination to call “bullshit” on HIMYM isn’t necessarily just because I’m hasty or overly critical, but because I’ve been conditioned to expect disappointment from most mainstream television I watch.

Take, for example, Lost. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone how good Lost is, how the writers are really going to answer all those questions this time, or, alternatively, how the viewer in question constructed a ridiculously elaborate explanation of their own for the blatant plot holes in the series to make themselves feel better about watching a show that’s overtly shitty. Making a connection between Lost and HIMYM may seem strange, but the fundamental concern is the same: HIMYM has good writers that follow up on the subplots and character developments they establish – Lost doesn’t. The writers of Lost are content to circle jerk ideas into a bowl, pick out the ones they think will evoke the most emotion from their audience and throw them into the show without context, connection or consistency.

This is what I like to call “J.J. Syndrome,” named for the producer of Lost, J.J. Abrams. A show is infected with the J.J. Syndrome when they haphazardly throw in plot devices or character development without a plan for an endgame simply to incite some really cheap emotional reaction from the audience. Because these circumstances are designed for a single emotional punch for the proverbial gonads, the writers don’t know how to follow up on the implications their narrative and character choices demand, and so the plot strains inevitably fall flat. In this way, Lost is much like the war in Iraq (dated political jokes – right on!).

A very simple example of this is when Charlie goes psuedo-apeshit, almost DROWNS A BABY (cue audience freaking out), and then everyone pretty much forgets about it two episodes later. If Lost had good writers that actually understood how people function or cared about their characters, Charlie would have been ostracized. It’s sad that I should feel justified in saying that the writers probably should have taken a page from the Survivor book and had the rest of the characters kick Charlie off their side of the island. But they wouldn’t, because Lost is bullshit. Trust me guys, they’re never going to answer those questions. If they ever do by some divine intervention, all the explanations they give are going to be incredibly mediocre, completely underwhelming, and obviously pulled out of their asses (or, I guess, their dicks, if we’re sticking with my previous analogy) last minute. Like in Heroes!

Hey, remember in the first season of Heroes when Peter kept having all of those visions of himself in New York with all of the other heroes that alluded to a really epic and fulfilling showdown between him and Sylar with everyone there and it could have been the coolest moment in television/nerd history? Remember how that didn’t happen? At all?

That’s because Heroes is another victim of “J.J. Syndrome”. Throughout the entire run of the first season of Heroes, the show did a really good job of building up tension for something super awesome that was to come later. They pumped out a bunch of buzz phrases to put on t-shirts (drinking game idea: take a shot whenever Peter says “save the cheerleader, save the world,” then break your Heroes dvds and go do something with your life), and all of the big “surprises” that addressed the buzz phrases were never that effective, but there was no bigger letdown than the finale of the show.

As aforementioned, Heroes constantly revisits this vision in which all of the characters that we’ve been following end up in the same place (they’re scattered across the country initially) to battle Sylar for the fate of humanity. Imagining what that fight could entail, even with a tv show’s budget was AMAZING. I was completely pumped for an all out, balls to the wall brawl. What I got was little to no explanation for why they were all in the same place and a two minute fight scene that ended with Sylar being taken down, not by a fireball or DL making him explode from the inside or something, but by a single goddamn punch. I stopped watching Heroes after that, because the finale made me realize that they weren’t actually planning anything; they were simply taking the Lost route by attempting to garner interest in a random plotline that they couldn’t follow through on.

The prevalence of these types of shows is what gave me so little faith in HIMYM’s ability to successfully establish and effectively follow through with a plotline, especially one with significant emotional relevance. It would have been incredibly easy – and almost in style – for its writers to have Marshall keep his job at the evil corporation and never come back to it again, or to completely drop any mention of Lily’s dreams for her painting career. The simple fact that they didn’t, that the writers actually carried through with these narratives in ways that reflected the histories and personalities established for the characters, is, as Barney would put it, awesome. And it’s something that many popular TV shows, be it Lost or The Office or 24, don’t bother to do, because they know they can get viewers regardless.

What most TV shows don’t realize is that they have the ability to be really, really fucking good. No other visual medium allows an audience to spend so much time with its characters, or to have the time to develop really intricate, interesting plots. In a movie, you only get two and a half hours, max, to make an audience give a shit about the people in it and to try and develop an engaging narrative. TV shows have the time to be able to tell a really awesome story with really interesting characters, but most of them ignore that opportunity because they are insistent on always introducing new elements without realizing that developing the ones they already have would ultimately be more rewarding for the audience. HIMYM does the former. J.J.Abrams and his television spawn do the latter. And that’s how HIMYM schools J.J. Abrams.

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The Powso team gets into a huff when they discover that SOMEONE is screwing up the website layout.

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