This year marked the end of two television dynasties, How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) and Psych. These two great shows both ended with pomp and circumstance, but at the same time with wonderment and a bit of confusion.
These two shows had a rather ying-yang relationship with one another in terms of plot and character building over the course of their final seasons. In HIMYM, we fell in love again with the characters for who they were and who they have become. Each episode up to the season finale of HIMYM was coming together in a brilliant fashion. Standing jokes were acknowledged; the slap bet finally ended, and characters were beginning to move on to the unknown. The finale was a different story, however. It was good for the writers to go back to the beginning and explain Ted’s drawn-out story of how he met the kids’ mother. However, in doing so, they seemed to have taken away the endless possibilities and futures implied throughout the entire season, and they almost completely disregarded the character building that took nine years to develop. But perhaps what was most disheartening was that I didn’t laugh. I didn’t find the season finale funny, just rather depressing and frustrating.
Psych was the exact opposite of this. Character building on the show seemed to have deteriorated completely during the last season. In fact, the characters acted like their original, pilot-episode selves, and it felt like it wasn’t ending at all. Guster took things too seriously; Shawn seemed like a bumbling fool who forgot to see and connected things that Papa Spencer spent more than one season teaching him to do, and half of the cast seemed to not even have existed yet. However, the finale made me almost forgive the writers completely for their indiscretion in the rest of the season’s episodes. Unlike HIMYM, Psych had the characters move on with their lives ⎯ heck, half of the characters are now in new cities entirely. Psych and the writers made a series finale the right way, with endless paths for the characters to take and a new beginning in their lives, all with laughter and comedy that they are known for.
These two wonderful shows ended with a bang, yet I somehow have a bitter taste left in my mouth with each of them. I think they need to get together and have an intervention on last season do’s and don’ts.
And I should get an intervention for over-analyzing TV shows.
