The magic of sitcoms is that characters don’t really change. Episode after episode, the inhabitants of an apartment, bar, or diner, experience all manner of wacky shit – and learn not much of anything.
So, after How I Met Your Mother spent nine seasons refining its players to instantly recognisable types, its character-bending finale threw a hell of a lot of fans off. Alyson Hannigan, who portrayed sweet Lily Aldrin on the show, has now admitted she thinks the show could have done better.
Speaking to News.com.au, Hannigan says the finale – which gave viewers whiplash when Neil Patrick Harris’ raconteur Barney Stinson married, then divorced, Cobie Smulders’ Robin Scherbatsky – didn’t come out as intended.
She admits Robin should have initially settled down with protagonist Ted Mosby instead of meddling with Barney’s prolific dating habits, and says that huge elements of the story were cut from the final episode.
“I was bummed they didn’t just make it a two-hour season-ender, so they would get to show certain parts,” Hannigan says.
“The table read for the finale was so good, so right, but it was also like 14 hours long.”
Those parts include a funeral scene for the legendary ‘mum’, who served as nothing but a narrative device for every episode of the show excluding the finale. Hannigan says “it just seemed too quick…
“‘OK, now we’re going to find out the mum’s dead, then suddenly, OK – he’s with Robin now’, and you’re just like, ‘wait, what happened?”
According to her, a full-on funeral scene was culled. She reckons the audience “needed that time to process that information, instead of having it slap them in the face.”
Maybe a director’s cut is in order. Or, you could just geek out about what the finale could have been with Hannigan herself, ’cause she’s in Melbourne next month for Oz Comic-Con.
Source: News.com.au.
Photo: How I Met Your Mother / CBS.
