HIMYM: The Problem with Douchey Ted

For my money, in the first couple of seasons of How I Met Your Mother, Theodore Evelyn Mosby was one of my the most likable leading men TV sitcoms had seen in ages. He was relatebly flawed in that he sometimes had trouble seeing beyond his immediate concerns and was overly focused on unrealistic ideals of romance; but the earnestness of his search for the love of his life, his willingness to recognize his occasional short-sightedness, and his devotion to his friends made up for it. The way Josh Radnor has owned the role, making Ted's committedness to his relationship with every potential Mother we've met appear idealistic and hopeful instead of desperate and crazed, really just adds to the charm. Even if you think Ted's got to settle down and worry less, you can't help but admire his zeal, at least a bit.

Over the course of the show's run, we've had a number of flashbacks to college-Ted, Marshall, and Lilly. One of the regular unspoken jokes was that college-Ted was a total poseur douche. He wears decorative "spectacles" and hemp. He drinks (cheap) wine instead of beer. He makes a lot of really overblown, suspiciously high-brow references. It always seemed to me that a large part of the reasoning behind this was to show how Ted has grown and changed. Some of the habits have stayed with him, like his love of poetry (we've been hearing about Pablo Neruda for ages), but he's learned to like them for what they are and not because of how liking them makes him look. College Ted would not have publicly acknowledged that his favorite movie is Star Wars and he would not have wanted to live in a house with swords on the wall. This knowledge of who he is is part of how we know Ted is ready to move on to bigger things in life.

Suddenly, though, in season 3, we hit a patch of episodes where Ted was neither in or actively looking for a relationship; and in order to add something to the character, perhaps, the writers decided that maybe Ted hadn't grown up so much. Douchey Ted was still sitting in there, waiting for boredom to let him out. From the incessant hair fussing to his obsession accurate pronunciations, we got glimpses of a Ted who was once again concerned with what the world thought of him to a disconcerting degree, a Ted who desperately wanted to be part of a higher station.

The major problem with Douchey Ted is that he's not the sort of guy The Mother, as we know her, would fall for. Ted is looking for a woman who plays bass guitar and whose favorite book is Love in the Time of Cholera. A woman who will laugh at his corny jokes and who will get along with his unpretentious group of best friends. And, based on the foreshadowing that's occurred, we know that all of these things are true of her. A woman like that isn't going to find a Ted who is obsessed with the image of class attractive.

Fortunately, Douchey Ted has mostly been a background character, one who mostly comes out of the wood work in supporting roles. Unfortunately, Ted has been playing a supporting role most of this season. Last night, though, Douchey Ted got his first foreground gig in an amusing but ultimately unrewarding episode. After sneaking into a high society party, Ted decides to stay rather than continue the night as planned with his friends, watching Robots vs. Wrestlers. Ted enjoys the party because it's a chance to hob-nob with the editor of the NYT Crossword and talk with people who appreciate opera and poetry. The problem is that, early in the episode, we see Ted trying to interject these things into conversation purely because he feels the group needs more class, not because they're things he, or they, legitimately care about.

Towards the end of the episode, while Ted is reciting Dante in Italian*, he has an internal monologue in which he realizes just what a douche he's being. He's looking for a way out when he is gleefully interrupted by a text in which Barney sends him a picture of his doppelganger, Mexican Wrestler Ted, at which point he runs off to meet the gang at the bar. I hoped that this was the writer's way of killing off Douchey Ted, and maybe it still is, but he still started quoting Emerson (or was it Whitman? all transcendentals look alike to me) as his apology. Maybe this was meant as a joke or one last affront. We can only hope.

I would also like to note that it's kind of weird that the writers chose to play Barney, Marshall, and *especially* Lilly as a bunch of classless slobs. Lilly is an aspiring artist with an expressed interest in theater and culinary arts. When she turned away the caterers at the party and agreed with Marshall's request for something more along the lines of "mini-cheeseburgers", I couldn't help but shake my head at how out of character it was. Oh well. In any case, let's just hope that season 6 can give Ted something to do to make him likable again, like finally meeting The Mother. Season 5 as a whole has mostly been a disappointment and the writers really need some direction.



*Ironically douchy note because I can: I'm not entirely convinced that he was actually reciting The Divine Comedy, as his cadence did not seem to match the terza rima scheme for which Dante is famous. :P