remember how i met your mother's concept episodes?

How I Met Your Mother put Ted, Barney, Robin, Lily, and Marshall through a lot of their best sitcom stories with the show's concept episodes. It gave me a lot to think about on my last rewatch. #himym #videoessay channel:    / @williamwinsett   instagram:   / wrwinsett   tiktok:   / wrwinsett   TV is cool because it's usually a lot of the same thing, but sometimes it's DIFFERENT?! When a viewer spends a lot of time with a character, writers can usually play with the way they tell stories with those characters. Some shows take full advantage of this and put out concept episodes - episodes of a show that base their stories around concepts that usually play out different from a normal episode. When I was recently rewatching "how i met your mother", I was surprised by how many concept episodes there were, and how well executed most of them were. I usually remember "how i met your mother" for Barney and Ted. Barney, from my memory, was an evil cackling womanizer rivaling Heisenberg for most deplorable protagonist, and Ted was Barney in a different font. A "nice guy" font. Like comic sans. Upon revisiting it those characters didn't stick out the most to me, it was just how often the show tried to change the way it told a story. The show's premise is that a father is telling his kids the story of every step it took for him to meet their mother. The show is presented as a story told by an unreliable narrator, Ted, who often sensors and exaggerates his stories for his kids, and sometimes messes things up, forgets things, or gets his stories out of order. The show reinforces the unreliable narrator perspective by often having events be presented as stories the group is telling each other, and thus changes perspective depending on who's telling the story. In all, the show makes you feel like a sixth friend, sitting at the fourth wall end of the bar, listening to our friends talk about their day. And it gives the show a lot of leeway to bend how they use their time. 00:00 - 02:28 intro 02:28 - 05:17 playing with time 05:17 - 07:22 social concepts 07:22 - 11:36 we can't trust ted 11:36 - 13:09 conclusion