This is how Barney Stinson was introduced
to audiences on the pilot of How I Met Your Mother.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Hey, so you know how I've always had
a thing for half Asian girls?
Well, now I've got a new favorite.
Lebanese girls.
[END PLAYBACK]
Then Barney turned into this.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- I just slept with my best friend's ex-girlfriend.
- And I just slept with my ex-boyfriend's really good
friend.
- Best friend.
[END PLAYBACK]
Then he became this.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Wow, you have enormous penis syndrome?
I've never heard of that.
- Yeah, that's the problem with EPS, lack of awareness.
[END PLAYBACK]
Returned to this.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- We really do have a ring bear.
- What?
[END PLAYBACK]
Until he finally ended up like this.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- You are the love of my life.
[END PLAYBACK]
Today, we'll be getting into Barney Stinson's
multiple character arcs.
But before we do that, don't forget
to like and subscribe to Nerdstalgic
if you haven't done so already.
Now the changes that the character of Barney Stinson
endures throughout the decade of television that was How I
Met Your Mother are sprawling.
Over the years, this character who starts out as a user,
manipulator, and quite frankly, just a terrible person
in almost every way imaginable.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- It's not cheating if you're not the one who's married.
It's not cheating if her name has two adjacent vowels.
And it's not cheating if she's from a different area code.
[END PLAYBACK]
Transforms into a hopeless romantic, a husband,
and ultimately, a loving and caring father.
Sitcoms like to put their characters into boxes,
for lack of a better metaphor.
In any given sitcom, you have your every-person,
your ingenue, your nerds, your slackers,
your wisecracking goofballs, your mentors.
Some characters make the audience burst
into applause on entrance, and some characters
trigger that extended fawning response
when they do something sweet.
Sitcoms can almost feel like a game of chess, in the sense
that each individual piece on the board
operates with its own set of rules.
Now not only is this a way of diversifying a show's content
by mixing and matching characters and scenarios
to ensure that things don't get too stale, too quickly,
it's also a way of managing audience's expectations.
See, when we turn on an episode of How I Met Your Mother,
there is a degree of predictability
that we, as viewers, find comforting.
However, there are moments in which these characters
need to grow and change.
The character of Barney Stinson is not the best example
of how to change a character.
In fact, he might be one of the worst examples
of how to change a character.
The main reason for this is the way
his character was set up from the start.
From the get-go, Barney Stinson was established
as a character who would disrupt social situations out
of boredom and manipulate women to get
what he wants from them, which was usually a one night stand.
He is a character that was written from the very beginning
as having almost no moral compass whatsoever.
Granted, this was back in 2005, and comedy was
a little different at the time.
But Barney Stinson's behavior is still pretty reprehensible.
He does manipulate women that he wants to sleep with.
He has gone as far as to film his sexual conquests
without asking permission to do so.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- No, no, no, baby.
Don't worry.
The flashing green light means it's off.
[END PLAYBACK]
And he has even brought up that he
may have engaged in human trafficking at one
point in time by selling a woman for a car.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- At one point, I'm pretty sure I sold a woman.
I didn't speak the language, but I shook a guy's hand,
he gave me the keys to a Mercedes, and I left her there.
[END PLAYBACK]
The point is, Barney Stinson was originally
intended to be one of the worst human beings on the planet.
And the writers spent almost five seasons
cementing that idea into our minds.
All of Barney's terrible behaviors and choices
seem to be explained away in a somewhat lazy fashion.
The writer's justification as to why Barney can get away
with behaving the way he does, aside from the fact
that he's played by Neil Patrick Harris who everyone loves,
is usually because he is a good friend
or that he sometimes makes a decision that mirrors
acceptable human behavior.
While the writers definitely try to make
this feel like it's enough for the viewers
to move on and accept Barney for who he is,
there's something that just doesn't
feel quite right about it.
This sometimes feels like they're
forcing Barney's arc to work and paying almost no attention to
whether or not they actually earned the right to do so.
Let's take a look at a similar character.
This is Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- The whole purpose of buying the boat in the first place
was to get the ladies nice and tipsy topside,
so we can take him to a nice comfortable place below deck,
and, you know, they can't refuse because of the implication.
[END PLAYBACK]
Like Barney Stinson, Dennis Reynolds
is an exploitative manipulator driven
by his own selfish desires.
He lies, cheats, and steals.
He has similar philosophies.
Where Barney Stinson has his playbook,
Dennis has the Dennis system.
They are very similar characters,
but the difference is Dennis Reynolds loses.
He's constantly trapped in his own personal hell designed
by the consequences of his own actions.
Barney Stinson doesn't really ever face any consequences
until later on in the show after the writers have already forced
his character through arcs and storylines
that they never truly earned.
Writing a good sitcom is essentially
like someone drawing a caricature
of what they think life looks like.
The features are exaggerated, but it still
resembles the real world.
Ideally, in the real world, we want
the bad guys to be held accountable for their actions.
This never really happens with Barney Stinson.
He's just sort of terrible until he isn't anymore.
In season five, Barney begins a romantic relationship
with Robin.
This is his first major pivot as a character on the show.
But even that is done through a fairly problematic lens.
We're never really rooting for Barney to end up with Robin.
In fact, at this point in the show,
we're actively rooting for Robin to run as far away from him
as possibly can.
This first fling between these two characters
goes on for about half of a season,
but ultimately, fizzles out.
However, the decision to put Robin and Barney
into a relationship made it very clear as to what
needed to happen with Barney Stinson's character in order
for his arc to make any sense.
This is where the writers introduce
the character of Nora.
Nora is another one of Barney's victims,
but not in the typical womanizing,
one night stand type of way.
You see, Nora is the first romantic partner
that Barney actually cares about,
who exists outside of the main plot of the show.
Robin and Barney had a pre-existing relationship
prior to becoming romantically involved,
whereas Nora and Barney were building their relationship
from the ground up.
Where Robin had already known and accepted Barney
for having his blind spots, Barney's relationship with Nora
serves as a vehicle for Barney to do
the work necessary to discover where his blind spots are
and how to become a better person in the process.
Now Barney still lies to Nora.
He still manipulates her.
And he eventually cheats on her with Robin later.
But unlike Barney's previous sexual conquests
and failed relationships, his relationship with Nora
is one of the first times Barney faces the consequences
of his actions.
He's forced to recount all of the times he had ever
lied to a woman for sex and show the audience that he
is aware and remorseful of the skeletons
that he's been hiding in his closet.
Sure, it took 146 episodes of television
to get to this point, but hey, better late than never.
After Barney's arc with Nora comes to a close,
he very quickly enters a sort of rebound relationship
with Quinn, who he very quickly proposes to.
These relationships get kind of hurried along
in the show's later seasons.
Barney's engagement to Quinn only
lasts for about three episodes before writers
begin pivoting Barney, once again, back
toward his relationship with Robin.
The writers then deepen our sympathies toward Barney
by delving into this really sad history with his father,
played by John Lithgow.
This relationship serves as a mirror for Barney
to catch a glimpse of where he might be headed.
The journey on which the writers decided to take this character
effectively humanized someone who
had been largely reprehensible up until this point.
Whether or not you think that the writers
did enough to redeem Barney is certainly debatable.
But up until this point, Barney had
been portrayed as little more than a somewhat problematic
tertiary character to the show's central plot.
By providing him with these character arcs,
Barney was able to carry the entire final season
of the show on his shoulders as the leading man.
It's hard to write a romance around a character like Barney.
Characters like this must be put through some type of trial
by fire for us, as viewers, to even begin
to entertain the fact that they might
be coming around and learning from their mistakes.
This sort of comeuppance for Barney
allows us, as viewers, to really finally be on board
with his relationship with Robin.
We stop seeing Barney as a well-to-do Playboy,
and we start seeing him as a human being with a heart.
This ultimately paves the way for Robin
and Barney's marriage, which serves as the through line
for the show's final season.
And it wouldn't have been possible
given the way Barney was developed in the show's
first five seasons.
Barney needed accountability to progress in our hearts
and minds as an acceptable suitor
to another beloved character.
After, it is revealed that Robin and Barney divorced
one another.
We are still on board with his redemption,
to the point of being excited and optimistic
over the idea that he will be entering
fatherhood with a woman he had a one night stand with.
And that's where we leave his character
at the crowning moment of his final character arc.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Everything I have and everything I am, is yours.
[END PLAYBACK]
Barney Stinson's many character arcs
are remarkable in the sense that almost all of them
were set up to fail from the very first episode.
The writers had plenty of misses with the character as well.
But there is something to be said about effort.
For all intents and purposes, the writers
could have just given up on Barney
and relegated him to just being a terrible person all the time.
But the efforts taken to humanize and educate him
result in us feeling good about where
we leave this otherwise problematic character
at the time of the show's conclusion.
It's never enough to just have characters
that engage in terrible behavior for no other reason
beyond thinking it's funny to be an awful human being.
We need to understand where the behavior comes from.
And we need to see our characters engage
in behaviors that rectify their actions if they
are to be redeemed.
Inversely, if we don't want these terrible characters to be
redeemed, they at least need to lose
for us to be on board with showing up to watch them
on a weekly basis.
Creating accountability and consequences for the characters
allows us to understand their humanity beyond what
we see on the surface.
And once our characters face the accountability and consequence,
they can change in a way that makes sense
with the context of the story, and also
in the way that can touch our hearts as a viewer.
It can turn something horrible into something tragically
hilarious or it can turn something monstrous
into something that feels genuinely heartwarming.
And hey, that's it for today's episode.
Don't forget to like and subscribe.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]