How I Creeped Out Thirty Girls In My Quest To Meet Your Mother

Is anyone else watching that show How I Met Your Mother? When it debuted in the fall, people were hyping it up as the next big thing in sitcoms -- though, to be fair, when Two and a Half Men is consistently recognized by critics as the best your particular genre has to offer, being called "the next big thing in sitcoms" starts to sound like rather faint praise.

The show has its moments, mainly because Doogie Howser -- or, Neil Patrick Harris -- is pretty funny as a materialistic, sexist, high-fiving horndog. Also, that tall drummer guy from Freaks and Geeks plays a fairly amusing goofball do-gooder. And Allyson Hannigan is hot.

But the show's protagonist -- fuck. Every week he does at least five or six things that make me want to punch him in the neck. He's this annoyingly sensitive man-child whose conception of romantic relationships seems to have been forged on a steady diet of Hallmark made-for-TV movies and Love Is cartoons. So he's always glaring meaningfully (and creepily) into women's eyes and talking about his soul mate or "the one" the way Harold and Kumar talked about White Castle. I don't even know if he has a job. Also, he looks kind of like Jimmy Fallon.

The premise of the show is that the narrator/protagonist is telling his young children the story of how he met their mother "back in 2005/06," so periodically there's a Wonder Years-style voiceover, or even a shot of the kids sitting on a couch and listening to the tale. Of course there are a number of problems with this setup, not the least of which is -- holy Lord, this sure is the longest anecdote ever told, and those sure are the most patient (or perhaps heavily medicated) kids in the known universe. Also, the dad apparently likes to tell his kids about how much of a drunk he and his friends used to be, how he had some one-night stands (interspersed with the aforementioned glaring-deeply-into-the-eyes). Eventually, maybe there'll be an episode in which the kids get up off the couch and scream "Jesus Christ, pops! We don't want to hear about this shit! Get to the fucking point already!"

Lately, the guy's been dating a pastry chef who, frankly, is just as annoying as he is, so maybe they're a good pair. When they finally decided to sleep together, their foreplay was to sit on the couch -- glaring deeply into each others' eyes, of course -- and say things like "I want to know your soul." Who says shit like this? Other than serial killers and pedophiles, I mean.

So why do I keep watching? I think I'm just hoping for the eventual episode in which the douchebag protagonist gets hit by a bus. Or maybe the twist is that there IS no mother, that everyone he knew got so sick of his constant whining and soul-mate searching that they refused to talk to him. So now he's kidnapped these kids and chained them to the couch, where they're forced to listen to his stupid story. Now THAT would be entertainment.