How I Met Your Mother Repeated Friends’ Worst Ending Mistake

Friends is one of the most influential sitcoms of all time, and while many other shows have tried to replicate it, only one is its true replacement, but it repeated its worst ending mistake. In 1994, Friends arrived to change sitcoms, breaking records and establishing a style that would go on to inspire many other shows for years.

Friends follows a group of six young adults as they navigate life in New York City, with all the ups and downs in their personal and professional lives. Although some elements haven’t aged well, Friends is still one of the best TV shows of all time, and among all the sitcoms that have tried to replace it, only one has come close to it.

How I Met Your Mother arrived a year after Friends ended and successfully replaced the iconic sitcom without being a carbon copy of it. Unfortunately, this also means that How I Met Your Mother repeated the worst mistake of Friends’ ending, despite having the chance of fixing it.

Created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, How I Met Your Mother premiered on CBS in 2005. How I Met Your Mother introduced the audience to Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), who is telling his children the many ups and downs of his love life when he was younger and the events that led him to meet their mother.

For this, the show takes viewers many years back to meet a young Ted and his best friends: womanizer Barney (Neil Patrick Harris), news reporter Robin (Cobie Smulders), and long-lasting couple Marshall (Jason Segel) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan). With their lives intertwined, the show follows their individual and collective attempts at navigating adult life in New York City.

It’s easy to see the similarities between Friends and How I Met Your Mother without having watched the latter, with both following a tight group of friends in a big city, all of them with very different personalities (and repeated tropes) and views on relationships, as well as different relationship statuses.

Some key differences are that the plot of How I Met Your Mother is told through flashbacks, it has more realistic and thus relatable storylines, and it went into deeper stories and themes a lot more often than Friends did, which mostly opted for a lighthearted tone. Still, How I Met Your Mother is the sitcom that has gotten closer to replacing Friends.

HIMYM & Friends Made The Same Romance Mistake In Their Finales

Unfortunately, among the similarities between Friends and How I Met Your Mother is the same mistake in their main romances in their final episodes. Throughout 10 seasons, Friends shared the spotlight between the love lives of its main characters, though it spent a lot more time following the chaotic relationship between Ross and Rachel.

How I Met Your Mother also gave time and space to the love lives of its main characters, but there was a special focus on Robin’s relationships with Barney and Ted, with Marshall and Lily being the most solid couple of the group.

What made this special in this show is that the audience knew Ted eventually got married and had children – they just needed to know who the wife and mother was. It wasn’t until the finale of season 8 that the identity of the mother was finally revealed, but How I Met Your Mother’s final episode made a huge reveal that ruined everything.

As it turns out, the mother, Tracy (Cristin Milioti), passed away years before Ted decided to tell the story to his children. Even worse, and as Ted’s teenage children point out, the whole story (and thus the entire show) was more about Ted’s feelings for Robin than his time with Tracy. In the end, they give Ted their blessing to pursue Robin, and so he does.

Throughout How I Met Your Mother, it was clear that Robin and Ted weren’t going to last, mostly because they had different life goals – while Ted wanted a family, Robin was focused on her career and didn’t want children. And yet, How I Met Your Mother brought them back together at the end, reminiscent of Ross and Rachel in the finale of Friends.

In it, after spending Rachel’s final night in New York together, Ross realized he wanted to be with her and tried to persuade her not to go to Paris. In the end, Rachel did get off the plane and reunited with Ross, with the show implying they got back together for good.

Not only did this destroy all of Rachel’s development, but it was also frustrating to see them together again. Friends spent many seasons showing how Ross and Rachel didn’t work together, and yet, it brought them back together in the final episode.

How I Met Your Mother didn’t have to repeat Friends’ biggest mistake, and it actually had the chance to do something much better. As mentioned above, the show had already established that Robin and Ted would never work together, so the finale could have positively reinforced that by showing it’s ok to let people go.

Ted could have remained single and maintained his friendships, showing the audience that that is also ok and healthy, instead of going after something he already knew wasn’t going to work out. How I Met Your Mother ended up going down the same toxic path as Friends, but, unlike the latter, it delivered one of the most controversial and hated series finales ever.