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HIMYM_marshall_lily.jpg

Why Sitcoms Are Always About the Single Guy, Not the Married Couple

By Daniel Carlson | Think Pieces | April 2, 2014 |

By Daniel Carlson | Think Pieces | April 2, 2014 |


The end of How I Met Your Mother brings with it many things: no more flash-forwards or teases, no more narrative fake-outs, no more episodes designed to play out the string. But the biggest hole it leaves in primetime television comedy doesn’t have to do with any of the show’s official major stories about Ted Mosby and his long-suffering search for love. Rather, it’s the departure of Marshall and Lily we’ll come to feel most sharply in the coming months and years. Played by Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan, they were something most viewers never get to see in a TV comedy: a realistic, committed couple who were together for the long haul.

Most TV comedies relegate serious relationships to supporting characters. Friends, notably, had Monica and Chandler, who got together at the end of the fourth season, married at the end of the seventh, and finished the series by adopting kids. On How I Met Your Mother, Marshall and Lily followed a similar pattern: they began the series as longtime partners, got engaged, and briefly separated before getting married and starting a family. They worked through a number of issues — financial problems, job insecurities, deaths in the family — but were always together. The plot was created to test them and bring them closer together, not drive them apart. Yet this is something that the lead characters on sitcoms almost never experience. While Monica and Chandler worked to grow as a couple, season- and series-long stories dealt with Ross and Rachel’s tumultuous relationship and ultimate reconciliation (in the series finale, no less). How I Met Your Mother was, for all its colorful storytelling, primarily about Ted’s search for love and fulfillment and his desire to create his own version of what he saw in Marshall and Lily. Sitcoms might let the lead character stay in a relationship for a little while (Ted did, and even got close to marriage), but these relationships always end in favor of keeping the lead single a little longer. The arrival of the true love, the one person tailor made for the lead character, is put off until the end. It’s viewed as a series-ending button on a long story, a clear-cut “The End” as a show fades out. Ross and Rachel went back and forth a million times and knew everything about each other, but they weren’t allowed to actually be together until Friends was down to its last commercial break. This is understandable, but it’s also unnecessary.

It’s understandable because the search for love, or the “will-they-won’t-they” tension between two leads, is a clear story that’s easy for viewers to understand and even easier for studios and networks to sell to audiences. This is a story about a guy looking for love; over here’s a story about two coworkers who secretly like each other. There’s room for individual details in the story even as the writers lay down a definite template and don’t deviate from it that much. Two people meet and develop feelings for each other, they overcome a very specific obstacle (being apart), and then they get together. Sitcoms like to repeat this on small levels for throwaway relationships and big levels for the “real” ones, but the moment where the two leads come together, or where the guy finally gets the girl, is seen as the end of the line. That’s where the energy is focused. That’s the goal.

What makes that unnecessary is that there are hundreds and thousands of stories to be told about couples in love who fight and work and grow together, who sacrifice for each other, who try to figure out what it means to be in a good relationship, and who do everything they can to make their relationship work. It’s not as if these stories are unheard of in sitcoms, either; they’re just on the periphery. Marshall and Lily dealt with debt issues, fertility questions, career worries, and the dim unease that comes with getting just a little bit older and wondering if this is what you’re supposed to be doing with your life. Monica and Chandler grew together and informed each other’s characters: he learned how to grow up, she learned how to be more giving. Happy Endings had Brad and Jane as the married part of their ensemble. Parks and Recreation did a little song and dance with April and Andy, but to the show’s credit, it soon enough skipped the formalities and just let them get married. Yet most comedies are afraid or unwilling to make those stories the primary ones. The American version of The Office drew its energy from the repression Jim and Pam put themselves through for years; once they finally got together, the series didn’t quite know what to do next, so it faffed around for a few years and drove artificial wedges between Jim and Pam as a way to recapture some of the show’s former glory.

There was no reason for How I Met Your Mother to minimize and prolong the appearance of Ted’s future love and the mother of his children. Things aren’t over when you meet someone; that’s when they’re just starting. Yes, the lead-up is exciting and thrilling in its own ways, but there are so many stories and moments that come after that. Learning to be with each other. Discovering who you are with another person. Wondering what to do with your lives together. Making major decisions about where and how to live. Having the same discussion about dinner and your in-laws a million times. Meeting a new group of friends through your partner and figuring out how to blend them with yours. It would’ve been fascinating and rewarding to include more stories like this on a major network comedy simply because they tend to get overlooked for what we convince ourselves are more dramatic options: falling in love, getting married, or dealing with death.

This isn’t anything new, either. Most TV comedies have stayed away from the romantic dramedy of two committed lead characters, and when they do present a committed central couple, they usually pivot into family stories pretty quickly. Bewitched and I Love Lucy only went one season before giving children to the main characters. Two high-profile sitcoms managed to focus on the relationship between the leads in recent years — Mad About You and The King of Queens — and though they took wildly different approaches to storytelling, they share something rare: a core belief in the union of their main characters. The plots are about their lives together after getting married but before having kids, when they’re learning how to navigate adult life as a couple. It’s a narratively rich area that comedies tend to avoid, maybe because creators are under the impression that there’s less comedy (or just too much drama) in a story about a relationship. But they also likely avoid such stories because relationship comedies offer no clear resolution, no signposts to mark your progress, the way a story about one person trying to get with another lays out a beginning, middle, and end. There’s no clear next step when you’re together. You just work at it and keep going. I can understand why that might make some creators nervous — “these two people love each other and do stuff” is probably harder to pitch than a gimmick-laden rom-com in reverse like How I Met Your Mother — but I’d love to see a writer or network take a chance on something built on a young relationship. There are so many stories to tell there. It’d be a shame to let them go untold.

Daniel Carlson is the managing editor of Pajiba and a member of the Houston Film Critics Society and the Online Film Critics Society. You can also find him on Twitter.