Well a funny comedy HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER has come to an end. And it was funny, and I enjoyed much of it. I'm willing to let go a lot of moral quibbles for humor's sake. But this show was part of a movement in television that began with SEINFELD, another favorite of mine, that I think is part of a moral negative turn in our society that is concerning. The ending of MOTHER upset some. The woman Ted had been seeking for seven seasons turned out to be little more than a plot device in her own right, and died a few years after Ted's children were born. The end of the story focused on Ted and Robin almost exclusively.
But that is how it always was with this show, and others like it. These shows, in the SEINFELD genre, look at the funny relationships between a tight group of friends, friends for whom no one else is really a person at all. These people know that they cannot exist as selfish beings isolated unto themselves, and so they get social satisfaction from a tight group. They have learned vulnerability, but only to a very few people, and so love, respect and caring extends little beyond that group. Everyone else who comes into the show is essentially a paper thin prop. Those who enter into relationships with these people who come from outside the group are not really persons in the sense that those inside the group are.
On Seinfeld there was "man hands", "close talker", "soup Nazi", etc. These people were not treated as people, but again as props. The core group of friends new they could not find fulfillment without some kind of caring, without something like love and respect, but that circle was kept small. On HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, you had Robin's boyfriend the dog, or the psychiatrist she cheated on shamefully, or the strippers Barney used or the bartender who was a great ploy for Ted and Barney to look big. There were some exceptions: Marshall's parents and the occasional person he helped actually further their own lives (the Warmpus episode comes to mind), but just think of the degree to which Barney used women and objectified them in the worst of ways: lying to sleep with them, etc. His friends would give a self-satisfied word of disapproval, but they never really challenged him on his abhorrent behavior, and never called him out the way a morally responsible person should.
This has become a dangerous trend in our society, and I don't know if life is imitating art or the other way around, but I see loyalty becoming more and more our world's highest value. This is a bad thing. Loyalty is wonderful and important, but mafioso's value loyalty above all other things. It is a value that can bring out our tribal tendencies if it is not subverted to values higher than itself. They do studies where they ask people moral questions like, "is it okay to give your friends free food at your work?" The degree to which people think it is okay to steal from their job for their friends is growing, according to these studies.
Extending the circle of selfhood to a tightly controlled group is not genuine vulnerability, and loyalty is only a value when it is subverted to higher moral principles. The lifestyle of those on HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER is not commendable, however successful by worldly standards. On Seinfeld, in the last episode, the curtain was pulled down to reveal the moral destitution that was the foundation of the show's humor. That was what the whole courtroom/jailhouse episode was all about. It was self-aware and on that level the humor had a moral message to it. But I don't think most people fully appreciated it. It is fitting, too that MOTHER ended up being all about those two people, and even the mother who was ostensible the reason for the entire show ended up being just another prop, a foot note in the story of two of those friends, for whom the sum total of moral reality was each other. The fact that this was all hidden as a genuine love story was a bit disingenuous though. In the end, I laughed at the show, but it was a laughter that hid a discomfort and a fear that such is the moral era we are entering into. May Christ change it all.
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