Structuring the Pilot: How I Met Your Mother
In the past, a sitcom was generally a show that aimed to create a situation that could seemingly go on for infinite episodes. This was especially true of network series, that would need to create twenty plus episodes a season and the most successful shows can last a decade. What this generally means, is the shows have incredibly episodic stories that could go on forever, real change very rarely occurring and no definite ending in sight.
How I Met Your Mother is a sitcom that feels like it aims for both. Though it is episodic to an extent, it tells the audience right away that there is an ending to this. Even in the title alone, the series calls its shot about a major plot point for the finale.
So how does this series, that plans to have its cake and eat it too, start out?
Act One: Big Moments
(A) Future Ted is about to tell his kids how he met their mother.
(A) Future Ted explains where he was in life in 2005.
(A + B) Ted and Marshal work through Marshals impending proposal.
(A + C) Ted asks Barney to go to the bar.
(A + C) Ted and Barney at bar; Ted is thinking about marriage.
(A + C) Past: Ted and Barney meet; Barney gives rules like no marriage until 30.
(A + C) Ted agrees with the flashback; Barney introduces him to Yasmin.
(B) Marshal struggles to keep his proposal secret when Lily gets home.
(A) Ted tells Yasmin his very thought-out wedding plans.
(B) Marshal is afraid to open champagne, tries to get Lily to do it.
(A + B) Split screen: Ted asks out Yasmin / Marshal Proposes to Lily.
(B) Lily says yes!
(A) Yasmin reveals she is dating Carl the bartender.
(B) Marshal and Lily had sex; he opens the champagne and the cork hits her in the eye.
(A + C) Ted tries to convince himself he isn’t ready for marriage; he sees Robin.
In the first moments of the show we are already shown exactly where the series must end up for Ted. Future Ted sits his children down and tells them that he is going to tell them how he met their mother. Whatever route we might take to get there, this is completely set in stone.
With the premise set up, we are essentially brought into the position of the children, as Future Ted begins to narrate what his life was like back in 2005, where his story begins.
The first moments we see of Ted in the present have Marshal, his best friend, proposing to him in their apartment. Marshal is practicing on Ted, wanting everything to be perfect when he does it for real with Lily. This scene acts as a jumping off point for both of the main stories we’ll be following in the episode: The A story of this proposal pushing Ted to feel he is ready to find “the one”; and the B story of Marshal’s relationship with Lily getting him over some fears.
Where the first of Ted’s friends we meet is in the process of settling down, his next is the polar opposite. Barney is the definition of a bachelor, preaching the joys of single life and belittling the idea of marriage. This is also a decent point to bring up the sort of C story, which I’m grouping together with a running gag because they are both focused primarily on Barney. The C Story is about Barney’s insistence on Ted wearing a suit, which is his active goal through the episode. His interest in Lebanese woman is brought up so much through the episode that it drives a degree of his actions (or at least his conversations), so though it is sort of just a running gag it feels worth bringing up, but not worth it’s own lettering.
Ted meets Barney at the bar, feeling impatient and ready to get to where Marshal and Lily are. Barney reminds him of the “rule”, that he isn’t even supposed to think about getting married until he’s thirty.
Of course, if it wasn’t obvious from how much effort it took for Barney to convince Ted to chill out about the marriage talk, it is made so by Ted’s topic of conversation with Yasmin. Ted has marriage on his mind, and no random rule is going to change that.
While Ted is blurting out his wedding plans, Marshal is struggling to keep his proposal a secret from Lily. He teases her that a surprise will be going on but then gets flustered when she asks about what it is. We’re also introduced to the idea that he is afraid of opening a bottle of champagne, an ongoing thread for the B story of the episode.
This all reaches a point where Future Ted calls out the “two big questions a man has to ask in life”, where Marshal proposes, and Ted asks out Yasmin. These moments are not only unified by the use of the narration, but also through the split screen that puts them both on display at once. Where the split screen helps compare the two questions the men ask, the cut to individual seems help to contrast the two different answers: Lily says yes; and Yasmin reveals she is dating the bartender.
Lily’s answer, as well as probably the sex that came after it, give Marshal an extra burst of courage (an important concept for him in the episode, more on that by the end), and he decides to try opening the bottle of champagne himself. Unfortunately, this new attitude leads to him popping the cork straight into Lily’s eye…
Ted is back to talking to Barney, trying to convince himself he isn’t ready to settle down. Though, his way of arguing it continues to prove the reverse. He asks, “even if I was ready, which I’m not, it’s like ‘Okay, I’m ready. Where is she?’” And, right on cue, he looks across the bar and sees Robin for the first time.
Act Two: First Date
(A) Ted is introduced to Robin by Barney.
(B) Marshal and Lily head to the hospital; Lilly overshares about their sex life.
(A) Ted and Robin hit it off; make a date for the next night.
(A) Ted and Robin on date; laugh at a Smurf penis (blue French horn).
(A + B) Ted asks Marshal and Lily to remember how he’s described his perfect woman.
(A) Robin has 5 dogs.
(A) Marshal mentions scotch.
(A) Robin loves scotch.
(A) Marshal mentions quoting Ghostbusters.
(A) Robin quotes Ghostbusters.
(A + B) Ted says he saved the best news for last.
(A + B) Robin hates olives.
(A + B) Marshal and Lily are super excited about Robin hating olives.
(A + B) Ted explains the olive theory to Robin; date heats up.
(A) Marshal and Lily excited for him; Lily asks why Ted is home already.
(A) Ted walks Robin home; Robin pulled away for work.
(A) Ted admits he didn’t kiss her; accused of chickening out.
(A + C) Ted calls Barney; told to meet at bar.
(A + B + C) Ted told he should have kissed Robin; decides to try again now.
(A + C) Ted gets in a cab with friends; finally wearing a suit.
(A) Ted steals the blue French horn.
(A) Ted gets back in the cab, ready for Robin’s.
The second act starts out with Future Ted narrating about his first sight of Robin:
“It was like something out of an old movie. Where the sailor sees the girl across the crowded dance floor and turns to his buddy, and says, ‘See that girl? I’m gonna marry her someday.’”
An expectation is set about the important of this moment, but in the present, it is instantly thwarted. Ted starts to say the line just as Future Ted describes, only to be cut off by Barney, making the claim that, “you now she likes it dirty.” It’s a bait and switch similar to when Yasmin says she has a boyfriend. These are jokes that work on their own, but by the end of the episode can be seen as a kind of foreshadowing of how romantic expectations can be misleading.
Marshal and Lily hop into a cab to get to the hospital. There is a moment with the cab driver asking accusingly about how Lily’s eye got hurt. The scene mostly works on the joke level of Lily oversharing about their sex life to a stranger, but on the story level it exists to continue to put Marshal into this position of someone a little too worried or afraid. In this case, too worried about hurting Lily to be able to aggressively spank her when she asks for it.
Back at the bar, Ted and Robin are hitting it off. Everything is going so well that he asks her out for the weekend; unfortunately, she is going out of town. He tries again, asking if she’d want to go out tomorrow instead, to which she says yes. Outside of Ted getting the date, we get some fun stuff of Ted giving Robin permission to throw a drink is his face to make her friends happy, and Barney being upset that Ted’s date means they can’t play laser tag together.
In this next grouping of scenes, we see how the show plays with time. Ted and Robin’s date plays out, and though we start on it as if it is the present, it becomes framed by Ted telling Marshal and Lily the story of the date after it’s ended. This is a way to play out scenes that not only becomes common place in the series but happens again (to a lesser degree) even in this single episode.
The effect of this kind of jumping back and forth in time has on the show is that we get to see the scene play out (in this case the date) while also getting new context that would usually have to come across in subtext. As we get moments like Robin quoting Ghostbusters, there are ways we could show how much this means to Ted: A shot of him smiling or maybe even quoting the next line; they’ve already established a narrator, they could easily have had Future Ted explain what this means. But instead of any of that, we have Marshal mentioning this as a quality Ted always talks about looking for. It isn’t just an internal thing that Ted wants, it’s something he has explicitly said he’s looking for enough times that his friends can list it off as a big thing for him.
On top of how much this reveals about Ted’s character, the lack of chronological story telling opens up the scenes to new jokes. As things are looking like they are leading back to Robin’s place after the explanation of the olive theory, we cut back to Marshal and Lily excited for their friend to get laid. Realizing the time, they also question why he is back so early if it’s the case. This leads into the end of the date where Robin is pulled away when Ted walks her home. In this moment, Marshal and Lily act as surrogates of the audience’s expectations from how well the date is going, as well as the ones with the ability to ask questions. They also work in a way to almost speed through set up, so that the flashes to the date can be mostly about a punchline.
Ted doesn’t kiss Robin at the end of the date, and this all his friends believe it was a huge mistake. Lily tells Ted that even “the dumbest single person in the world” would agree. So, Ted calls up Barney to meet them at the bar. Of course, Barney tries again to tell Ted to suit up.
Well, Ted still doesn’t put on a suit. Barney is upset with Ted, and fully agrees with Marshal and Lily that Ted should have kissed Robin. Barney even kisses Marshal to prove you don’t need the signal doesn’t exist. Ted’s friends convince him he made a mistake, and he’s convinced he might not ever get a second chance. That is, until she pops up on the TV reporting the news.
Robin reports on a man who stood on the side of a bridge, but in the end decided not to jump. Ted’s inspired. He’s ready to do something crazy, saying he needs to take that leap and go see Robin right this moment. He backtracks a little when he sees the problem in his metaphor where the man on the bridge taking the leap would have meant death. For Ted, taking the leap means making a real move, a romantic gesture, to be with the woman he thinks he could maybe someday marry. Regardless of whether things happen with Robin, this the moment in Ted’s life where he realizes he is definitely ready to be where Marshal and Lily are.
The four friends pile into a cab, Barney finally convincing Ted to put on a suit.
Before Ted can talk to Robin, he needs them to make a stop. He gets out of the cab and steals the blue French horn that he and Robin joked about on their date. It isn’t enough for him to just show up, he does something big to show her how he feels.
Act Three: Reveals
(A) Ted and friends arrive at Robin’s.
(A) Ted walks up to the door… He forgot something.
(A) Flashback to when Robin said she has five dogs.
(A + C) Ted starts to run away when the doorbell makes the dogs go crazy; he’s invited up.
(B + C) Lily gets out of the cab; Barney asks if Ranjit’s wife is hot.
(A) Ted is offered alcohol by Robin.
(B) Marshal admits the olive theory is based off a lie.
(A) Ted tells Robin he’s in love with her.
(A) Ted’s friends are shocked.
(A) Future kids are shocked.
(A) Robin is shocked.
(B) Marshal says with Lily he isn’t afraid of anything; she is okay with the truth about olives.
(A) Ted and Robin are awkward; Ted says it again.
(B) Lily, Marshal, and Barney decide to go to the bar; cab drives them away.
(A) Ted sees his friends are gone; takes one last shot with Robin.
(A + B) Ted explains the night to his friends; they all drink champagne.
(A) Future Ted admits he was getting the signal; says he was too close to the situation to see.
(A) Future Ted tells his kids that this is how he met their Aunt Robin.
The cab arrives outside of Robin’s, and Ted tells Marshal to remember this story; he’ll be needing it for his best man speech someday. It upsets Barney (who says he is Ted’s best friend), but Ted is already outside.
As Ted walks up to the door, we get a quick flashback to remind us that Robin has five dogs. When Ted rings the doorbell, they do what you’d expect, and start barking like crazy. After a moment of nearly running away, Ted looks up to find Robin sticking her head out of her window. He shows off the French horn, and she invites him up.
These next two bits cut back and forth a lot, so rather talk about them in the way they happen in the episode, I’m just going to sort of treat everything in Robin’s as one scene and everything in the cab as one scene.
Up in Robin’s apartment, Ted tells her he came by for the olives that she promised. She offers alcohol and puts on some smooth jazz. Everything about her is coming off like she is happy they get to pick up where their date left off.
The two of them dance together, getting close, speaking softly as they describe things that they like about each other (Robin mentions liking Ted’s olive theory, but I’ll get back to that). And then, Ted says something crazy. He tells Robin, whom he has known for less than a day, that he thinks he’s in love with her.
We jump around to different people: Ted’s friends at the bar, presumably in the near future when Ted tells them what happened; Future Ted’s kids in 2030; and Robin herself. They all have the same shocked reaction that Ted would say this to a woman so soon.
The two become incredibly awkward and decide it is time for Ted to leave. Robin still wants to give him the olives. It comes off like a sign that maybe it could be possible that they could get past this someday. But of course, Ted ruins it and says he loves her. Again.
In the cab (reminder, this is intercut with all the Robin’s apartment scenes), Barney makes womanizing comments, leading Lily to decide she needs to get out of the cab. Barney takes advantage of this by using it as a time to interrogate Marshal, questioning him about the olive theory. Barney says that he saw Marshal eat olives, so it can’t be true.
Marshal admits that the olive theory is based off a lie. On his first date with Lily, she asked for his olives and he said he hates them as an excuse to give her what she wanted. Barney uses disproving the theory as an excuse to tell Marshal he shouldn’t get married. And it is at this point that we see Robin and Ted getting close, and her saying she likes the theory. This juxtaposition of proving the theory wrong and a new relationship forming with the theory sort of as its basis, works to foreshadow that it is going to go wrong.
Marshal refuses to listen to Barney’s reasoning. He loves Lily. He says that he is afraid of a lot, but not when it comes to the idea of spending his life with her. Lily comes back in time to hear this. She leans in to kiss him, but he stops her just long enough to admit he likes olives. She doesn’t care, she says they’ll make it work, kisses him anyway. This is like the climax of the B story. Marshal isn’t letting fear get in the way of being totally honest with Lily, she makes him more brave.
Ted came up with this crazy theory about how love works, but we’re shown explicitly through Marshal and Lily that it isn’t so simple. It doesn’t come down to one simple fact about each person, it comes from the years they spent together.
Anyway, the group in the cab decide to go to the bar. They have no idea how long Ted will be, for all they know he’ll spend the night. So, of course, the moment the cab drives off is when Ted comes walking out with Robin.
When Ted notices the cab is gone, he asks Robin for directions to the subway. He takes a few steps before stopping again. He turns back and gives a big speech to Robin, all about how he sucks at being single, and how this evening is proof of that. But he goes on. He says that if he could find the one who would put up with him through all of this, he would make a “damn good husband”.
And, to a degree, his speech works. He moves closer to Robin, and when he puts out his hand for a handshake, she steps closer too. They shake hands, but it couldn’t be clearer that they are both thinking about more, especially as Ted mentions being a good kisser. But he doesn’t take it any further.
Later that night, in the bar, Ted tells his friends everything that happened. He’s once again told that he should have kissed her; that the moment he and Robin shared was the signal.
The table gets a bottle of champagne and now Marshal can open it. Being with Lily, as well as possibly because he’s finally come clean about olives, he’s no longer scared of it. They all cheers, as Ted continues to insist that he didn’t miss the signal.
Future Ted gives a little more narration, where he admits that it was the signal, and that he was “too close to the picture to see the puzzle forming”. He’s saying that everything that happened this night was a more important step than he could have realized back then. And then he reveals that this has been the story of how he met their Aunt Robin. His kids are annoyed because they were told it would be about their mom. Future Ted says he’ll get to it, but it’s a long story.
Conclusions
The story of How I Met Your Mother works in a somewhat achronological way. Though most time is spent with a progressing narrative starting the night Marshal is going to propose, it is told from a future perspective, and let’s itself play with how the story is shown to us. And because the entire series is to work in this kind of way, the pilot must set a precedent for what we can expect from everything moving forward.
We get our first hint of this with the cutaway to when Ted and Barney first met, as an explanation for why Ted can’t get married until he is 30. It plays like the way someone just telling a story to their kids would do it, they reach a point where it needs some clarification from earlier in his past, so he jumps back for a quick second to let us know what happened before continuing back where he left off.
But this isn’t our only demonstration as to how time is played with. When we reach Ted and Robin’s date, we move from the date itself to Ted telling his friends about it afterwards. It’s this weird layer of Future Ted telling the story of present Ted telling his friends the story of his date with Robin. It works almost as a way to show a highlight reel of the date rather than a scene of the entire thing.
Because both moments happen earlier on in the episode (acts one and two, respectively), when the third act takes advantage of this it feels far less jarring that it otherwise would. The moment Ted says he thinks he’s in love with Robin (the first time), our first jump is to his friends at the bar freaking out. In terms of everything we have seen, we don’t have a definite point to connect their reaction too. But because it was set up earlier that time is played with, and we can move between events and Ted’s telling of the events, it is heavily implied what is going on here.
The continuous narration and the couple times we cut back to the kids in 2030 are set up for similar purposes. The first scene could have acted as simply a setup to get us into the series, but then the fact that we cut back to the kids more than once is allowing for it to continue to do so as the series progresses.
It is because the pilot needs to set up so much that we see so little of things like flashback cutaways, that in other episodes could be a huge driving force. We only really get one, but that is enough to establish it as an element that the series can go back to moving forward. There couldn’t really be more, because the episode main focus is still to establish who all these characters are in the present.
The main point I’m driving home here, that I don’t think I bring up often in these, is how much the pilot acts not only to set up what the series story and characters are, but to set up what the viewer should expect going forward in terms of things like narrative devices. Sure, new things can be introduced later on, but this generally happens in one off episodes where the device is brought in just for a particular kind of story, not to shift the whole series to use it.
It is through the use of time that we also have the “called shot” of where the series will end up. Future Ted telling this story to his children, saying it is the story of how he met their mother, tell us that there is a point to the series as a whole. It is telling us what to expect by the end, even creating a mystery around who could be the mother.
While this expectation is created, the episode works in a way to suppress it. While the series is explicitly about how Ted meets the mother of his children, the pilot isn’t about that. It is about the moment Ted realizes he is ready to find the mother. With this focus on the more granular aspects, the things that lead to not only physically meeting her but being emotionally ready for it, the series has space to play with before ever reaching a destination.
Along with this, is the fact of how much screen time is given to the other characters, specifically Marshal and Lily. Ted may be the main character, but his friends are a close secondary (Robin and Barney not quite as much in this episode, but they’ll eventually grow to hold their own stories). These other characters being given so much importance are essentially wild cards. We know where Ted ends up, but know absolutely nothing about the rest of them, aside from the fact that they must stay in Ted’s life since he refers to them as his kids aunts and uncles.
It is a rare sitcom that begins with an end in mind, but leaves itself so open to small steps being made for Ted, and builds strong secondary characters to hang stories on, that allows it to play in a more episodic space.
