Sitcoms are either hit or miss for me. Most of the time I get annoyed by the stock characters and poor writing, but occasionally I also get hooked and end up watching every episode, waiting religiously for the next week’s gem to come out.
Just the other day I was talking with a friend about How I Met Your Mother. We both agreed that Ted was lame and the show wouldn’t be worth watching without Barney.
“Except I would never date Barney,” she said. Well of course not. What woman would? To be fair, the guy doesn’t even date so much as sleep with every attractive woman that walks by.
She went on. “I would marry a Ted though. But I could never even date a Barney.”
Well sure. Barney is awesome, the kind of guy most men wish they could be. But he doesn’t usually feel real. Ted, on the other hand, might be annoying as hell, but he’s easy to relate to.
And it hit me. We might watch HIMYM for Barney, but we’re all Teds. We relate to him. It’s easy to sympathize with Ted; he goes through job troubles, desperately wants to find the woman of his dreams, and constantly compares his life to what the people around him are doing.
This isn’t exclusive to How I Met Your Mother. My favorite sitcom right now is The Big Bang Theory. I love Sheldon; he, like HIMYM’s Barney, is the show’s breakout character. A super-genius whose arrogance is tolerated by those around him because he really is that awesome. All the other guys on the show are geniuses too, but he calls them idiots because to him, they are. It’s amazing. It’s hilarious.
Except my ability to empathize with Sheldon is usually at a zero. As much as I love the character, I can’t normally relate to him. The other characters on the show rightly joke that he’s an alien. Sheldon might be the show’s breakout character, but the super-awesome brilliant scientist genius isn’t someone I can relate to.
Nope. Unfortunately, the character that I can relate to is Leonard. The socially awkward geek who desperately wants the hot girl to like him. The nerd who unsuccessfully tries to find someone to be with, the character that fixates on what women think of him. This is the guy I relate to.
I don’t think I’m in the minority here, either. As great as Sheldon is, most people aren’t like him. What we are like is Leonard; obsessed with what our significant other might think of us, a little ashamed of our guilty pleasures (the dude tried to lie about playing Klingon Boggle), and wanting nothing more than to be like the guys he sees Penny date.
What does that say about us, as an audience? That while the writers can create characters like Sheldon and Barney to keep us entertained, they keep the annoying Ted and whiny Leonard
in there as the main character so we have someone to relate to. We aren’t all girl-obsessed egomaniacs or brilliant scientists, we’re the depressed and perpetually single person that the awesome guy mocks.
A new show I’ve gotten really into is The New Girl. Despite loathing Zooey Deschanel (If your eyes weren’t so huge you would just be a poor man’s Anna Friel) I think Jess and Nick are my favorite characters on the show, hands down.
The first half dozen episodes mostly focused on how Jess had been cheated on by her long-time boyfriend and how Nick was still utterly heartbroken and emotionally damaged from his girlfriend leaving six months earlier.
The writers aren’t even trying here. Instead of having a breakout character they just made somebody to take everyone else’s abuse (Schmidt) while letting the others come across as pretty cool. But Nick? Jess? They’re both depressed and even talk about how they feel worthless without their exes.
In the very first episode Jess lies on a couch crying and watching Dirty Dancing over and over, because she doesn’t know how to deal with the breakup. Flashbacks show that Nick drinks a lot to deal with his pain and often ends up calling his ex while drunk.
The two most likeable characters are both grief ridden. And even in later episodes when they appear to have moved on, they still cite their exes as the causes of new problems or fears that come up.
Three of the best sitcoms on television right now, and they all include characters that are miserable or depressing. And to make it worse, these characters are us.
If you disagree, then I applaud you. Maybe you’re like Marshall and you’ve been in love with the same person for a decade already. Maybe you’re single but you like it that way, and you think you’re a Barney, not a Ted (Actually, you’re neither. You’re Schmidt. Congrats.).
For the rest of us though, we’re the main character in a show where everyone else seems to have something good. The good news is that if Barney and Sheldon aren’t real, if everyone is a Leonard, then that means we’re all looking for something. At least we have the comfort that girls as hot as Penny exist.
Rich Solomon can be reached at minaret.commentary@gmail.com.