Its willingness to play with story structure has always been a part of How I Met Your Mother’s charm. I give the show enormous credit for continuing to do so, even while it enjoys ratings as high as they’ve ever been midway through season seven. Any show hitting that ratings stride so late in its run is rare, and you couldn’t begrudge it if wanted to coast and ditch the experimenting, with syndication and an eighth season comfortably locked up.
“The Burning Beekeeper” was a skillfull experiment, if not a totally successful one. It executed its inventive premise—replaying a five minute span three times, and following each story based on the room that each piece of it took place in—remarkably well, a tribute to the talent of director Pamela Fryman. And I found most of the jokes amusing, particularly Ted and Robin's quarrel. But underneath the meticulous choreography, the story itself was a bit of a mess, with too much going on among too many characters.
On the one hand, it was fun to watch how each act added a new layer, as the mini-plots came together. On the other hand, it all felt so much like clockwork that I couldn’t invest in what was actually happening, even on second viewing. The payoff was strictly in putting the pieces together, rather than in delivering a comic or emotional climax. Sadly, it’s all too easy to envision that same critique extending to the series as a whole by the time it’s all said and done.
An ungenerous reading of an episode like this is HIMYM falling back on a gimmick yet again to pad out an uneventful season. But gimmicky/non-linear storytelling is simply in this show’s DNA, and I have no problem with that in and of itself. It’s a philosophy that’s generated superlative episodes like “The Pineapple Incident,” or more recently “The Ducky Tie.” And even when it fails it at least produces interesting failures (unlike, say, most of the last two seasons of The Office, which fails in the blandest ways possible). It’s a spirit that, as long as it persists, keeps alive the hope of reclaiming those occasional creative peaks to match the commercial ones.
Other notes:
- Yes, it didn’t take, but still, Marshall—resigning ANOTHER job? After years trying to claw into your chosen field? And with a child on the way and a new house? Martin Short is your boss, of course he’s going to be an eccentric jerk. Learn to deal.
- “We have mice?” “Not with all these bees flying around, we don’t. You’re welcome.”
- “Every penis is a girl, Robin, everyone knows that. Like…ships. And lake monsters.”
- “If I left things in your dainty, lily-white, never-ripped-an-old-lady’s-wig-off hands, we would be kugel free right now.”
- “That was Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest.”
- “I got that cheese off the Internet.”
Filed under: How I Met Your Mother
