The Best Show Nobody's Watching

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HIMYM walks the fine line between comedy and sentimentality flawlessly: a recent episode in which Ted contemplates moving to New Jersey to live with his fiancé deftly tackled the nuances of compromise and suburbia with a steady stream of Jersey jokes. What stretching of reality does occur is offset by the fact that the story is being told in reverse—future Ted embellishes, allowing the writers more outrageous wiggle-room. Ted, Barney, Marshall, Lily, and Robin don’t sit in a coffee shop all day instead of going to work: they drink, in a bar, at night. How I Met Your Mother isn’t just the next Friends; it’s better than Friends. So why is nobody watching?

Obviously, CBS being the old-man/gray-haired-lady network of Two and A Half Men, The New Adventures of Old Christine, and now Gary Unmarried doesn’t help. (Even as CBS network claimed third last week in the 18 to 49 demographic, narrowly beating out NBC, it is still miles behind ABC and FOX.) How I Met Your Mother is a twentysomething show on what hip twentysomethings typically associate as an old man network.

Watch a recent clip from How I Met Your Mother

Lest I continue to bitch about how none of you silly people watch How I Met Your Mother I should note the show has had its successes. Last month, Lifetime snapped up exclusive syndication rights to the show. How I Met Your Mother sold for a reported $750,000 per episode (second-only to Two And A Half Men, which sold for $800,000), after a vigorous bidding war between TBS, FX, ABC Family, and Comedy Central.

Which only makes the fact that CBS has not been overly friendly to How I Met Your Mother that much more insulting. The network did not renew the show for a fourth season in February, as it did with most of its returning shows, but instead waited until May to do so, leaving the cast and crew in a lurch. How I Met Your Mother is co-produced—owned by Twentieth Century Fox but aired on CBS—which means the show’s profits are split between the two companies, further relegating it to unwanted-stepchild territory. This often happens with co-produced shows: NBC happily handed over the eight-year-old cult hit Scrubs to ABC this year.

Besides, CBS has never been able to match NBC’s brilliant promotional campaigns. People just don’t buzz about CBS shows the way they do NBC. Even to this day, people associate “Must See TV” with Thursday nights on NBC, despite the fact that the network hasn’t much used that slogan since the ‘90s. And today, Harris points out, “NBC will just declare The Office a huge hit, and that’s their marketing technique. People who watch those ads go, ‘Oh, The Office! This is a big, giant hit, I better watch it.’” He sighs. “One of the things I’m learning is just to not meddle. If they choose not to do a big promotion to push for our show, there’s nothing I can do about it. I hope that they do, but it’s fine.”

Not least of all because the plethora of choices (there are more than 30 comedies on the air this season) have allowed shows to both become more niche and viewers more selective, making it much harder for comedies to succeed. Friends could pull in 50 million viewers on a good night; now, not so much. “There aren’t monster hits anymore,” co-creator Carter Bays acknowledged to The Daily Beast. “I think there’s less money going into it, just because the money is so spread out and you have so many networks. It’s not like the Fox Corporation [How I Met Your Mother’s home studio] has thirty hours of primetime a week, or however many hours it is. They’re programming for FX, for all their other networks and cable channels.”

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