How I Met Your Mother may have ended a while ago but there’s still much to love about it, such as how it gave us one of Breaking Bad‘s best characters and how it gave birth to the ‘Cheerleader effect‘. But one aspect about How I Met Your Mother that hasn’t aged well is its protagonist, Ted Mosby, because, well, he’s a jerk.
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Over the course of How I Met Your Mother‘s eight seasons, we’ve been shown countless instances of Ted not being the nice guy he likes to think he is. Aside from the fact that he’s essentially telling his kids about all the women he hooked up with during his single days, he’s a bit of a douche for doing things like:
- Not remembering the name of women he’s dated
- Cheated on Veronica, then convinced her to dump her fiance for him, only for him to dump her later
- Pressures Robin into dating him (and tells her he loves her) in the very first episode
- Being a homewrecker by ruining Veronica’s and Zoey’s relationships
- Exhibiting all the textbook “nice guy” tendencies
- Just being a pretentious jackass
But the thing that firmly cemented Ted in the “jerk” category is how he portrays Barney over the course of How I Met Your Mother. We all know that Barney is a bit of a womaniser and arguably a bigger douche than Ted ever was, but that’s only because Ted chose to portray his “best friend” that way.
A wild theory puts forward the idea that since How I Met Your Mother is a show told from Ted’s POV, he’s going to take creative licence by portraying Barney as a worst person than he is so he can not only come off as a better person, but also so his kids can take news of him chasing after Robin (again) now that he’s single and she’s divorced from Barney.
Hell, even Neil Patrick Harris agrees with that assessment and points to a season five episode where Ted exaggerates how Barney and Robin let themselves go during a rough patch in their relationship, explaining:
“There’s the crazy things, like when Barney and Robin started dating, and they get tired of each other; in that episode, Barney had gained 75lb, and Robin had her hair falling out and had gaps between her teeth! So Ted’s revisions of the characters are, for sure, proven.”
So as entertaining as Ted Mosby can be on How I Met Your Mother, he can also be a jerk. And now with the benefit of hindsight, it seems like Ted was an even bigger douche than we initially pegged him to be.
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