FRIENDS and How I Met Your Mother

It’s fun to compare the two shows, one from the 90s and the other from the 2000s. It’s like quite a lot of How I Met Your Mother was based on FRIENDS. Take for instance, How I Met Your Mother’s MacLaren’s Pub downstairs of Ted and Marshall’s apartment (later Ted and Robin’s apartment). FRIENDS used to have a bar and billiards downstairs of Monica and Phoebe’s and Chandler and Joey’s apartment building, “now” it’s a coffee shop called “Central Perk”. Scenes are mostly in the apartments or in the establishments they hang out in, but How I Met Your Mother definitely has more sets. I don’t recall FRIENDS ever using any visual special effects, just camera work, but How I Met Your Mother does a little of those.

Both shows have extreme characters. It’s just that How I Met Your Mother characters have more common jobs than FRIENDS (Dr. Ross Geller, Paleontologist; Phoebe the Missus). There’s really good comedy, but there’s more drama in FRIENDS. There’s romance in both shows, but more in How I Met Your Mother.

FRIENDS was set in the 90s and told in “real time”. HIMYM is built on flash backs and clips of the future. There are more running jokes in FRIENDS than there are in HIMYM. The problem with that is, it’s hard to understand once you see or hear the gig. HIMYM is more on funny catch phrases and pun or word play. That’s what’s new and interesting about it.

HIMYM is probably the FRIENDS of the new generation. It also gets to make fun of old sitcoms as it did FRIENDS when the boys attempted to do the coffee shop gig and when they mimicked CHEERS at the end of that episode where everyone called Barney “Swarley.”