Upon the recommendation of a friend and the fact that I have nothing but time thus far in Portland, I Netflixed How I Met Your Mother. There’s no good reason that I wasn’t watching it already. Jason Segel is one of the stars and few people are more enjoyable to watch on television or in movies than he. Plus, there are a ton of awesome guests on the show: Bryan Cranston, Bill Fagerbakke (who is perfect to play Segel’s dad), Samm Levine, Martin Starr (!), Michael Gross, and many more. I think I stayed away because the multi-camera/laugh track-laden sitcom is tired. Why confine yourself to sets and basic camera set-ups when you don’t need to? And is anyone not annoyed by laugh tracks anymore?
Now that I am 2/3 of the way through season three, I can’t help but think that How I Met Your Mother really wants to be a single-camera show, but is hanging on to some sort of link to sitcom history by not going that route. The show isn’t filmed in front of a live studio audience (which you can tell when watching the outtakes from the show – you only hear crew laughter). Also, there are innumerable cutaways and inserts and fantasies in each episode that are almost universally the domain of single-camera shows (and they would be nearly impossible to have a live audience engage with). I’m not surprised How I Met Your Mother has won so many technical Emmy’s for being a multi-camera show, but if you have greater ambition with the editing and camera work, break free of it.
There are so many limitations with the set-up. The framing and organization of the cast always seems so staged with everyone facing the camera or the sides of their faces at most. Everything else in the show feels so smooth and natural that this aspect jumps out at me. Plus, the show deals surprisingly explicitly with sex and drugs and the old multi-camera set-up has a connotation of a certain type of content. Sure, there have been shows that dealt in these subjects before, but Friends and Seinfeld jumped through hoops to lighten the blow (yes, I know HIMYM referred to marijuana as “sandwiches,” but it’s still directly referencing pot use).
Aside from the editing and fantasy sequences, perhaps the most single-camera sitcom-y facet is that each episode builds on previous episodes. Again, it’s not the first multi-camera to do this, but the episodes are far more focused on the story moving forward (which is necessary since that’s the entire basis for the show). And while the show gets bogged down in the occasional sitcom cliché, it also does its part to point it out and mock said clichés.
Maybe that’s why How I Met Your Mother is shot this way. It can better play with sitcom conventions the closer it resembles a sitcom. Or maybe it’s just cheaper. Either way, I just can’t help but feel HIMYM would be better served as a single-camera show. The freedom that approach provides would really allow them to go nuts with some of their great gags, of which they have many (the Slap Bet is brilliant).
No comments:
Post a Comment