De Gli Antoni is a genius.

HIMYM is kind of a hybrid multi-cam and single-cam show.  I've heard it suggested that if it had come out even a year or two later than it did (or been on a different network, like NBC), they wouldn't have bothered with the laugh track and the three-walled sets and would have simply made it a straight one-camera show.…

Yeah, it was pretty damn funny in the early seasons. There was little character development, but if you just wanted a no-frills joke machine, that was your show.  As others have pointed out, the (mainly female!) supporting characters tended to get the best wisecracks - Berta, Rose, Evelyn, etc. It's not smart like…

I think what really trips people up isn't the way it's shot, it's the studio audience/laugh track.  If you check out an IMDB forum or whatever for any multi-cam show, it will be chock full of people complaining about the laugh track, even relatively unintrusive ones like How I Met Your Mother.  I suspect it's mainly…

I generally enjoy Big Bang Theory, but Sheldon's increasingly uncompromising horribleness as the show wears on is getting really hard to tolerate.

Good post.  I wish this article had dismantled these silly false dichotomies and rivalries between groups of shows, rather than fanning the flames.  I happen to like goofy popcorn shows like Big Bang Theory, and I also like Parks & Recreation and Community. There's room for both, but more importantly, completely…

Come on, that D & D one was solid.

Nah, it's fine.

It's funny how, besides the stupid Community "rivalry," the other main reason people seem to hate this show is simple leftover high school nerd rage.  They just can't stand that the show is poking fun at them.  Seems awfully thin-skinned to me.

@avclub-9808b9d9bef3cc06261d0ca743532cfc:disqus - re: going into space, etc:  I always thought it would have worked better if they had made them IT guys or something - you know, nerds that most people could know (or be) in real life. I'm pretty sure I've never even seen a professional theoretical physicist in real…

@avclub-b97fa993e1616965ac436401de58042d:disqus - Because it aired opposite Community.

Thanks for givin' us an excuse to party one more time.

You've not had to talk a parent through doing something on a computer, have you? 

Brett Favre?

That proposal stunt was one of the most asinine examples ever in the show of that super artificial and hard to swallow gimmickry they've been doing the last few years, but that shot of Ted looking at his building is as haunting and real as anything they've done.  I think of it whenever I'm feeling pensive and…

I'm thinking he will give the locket to Barney (if he hasn't already), but then do his part to ruin the wedding by melting down while doing his best man speech. 

I'm pretty sure Bays and Thomas have written almost all of both the best and worst episodes in the series.

That made me think of the Patton Oswalt thing - "Bring forth my doom-spawn from your stink-crevice and PROVE THE GYPSY WRONG!"

I say bang, bang, a-bangity bang bang, a bang bang bangity bang

Yeah, jumping right in was a refreshing approach and I'm thrilled they decided to it that way.  That's what I briefly thought they were doing a couple of years ago with Barney and Robin, in "Symphony of Illumination," which came right in the middle of the tiresome two-year-long gradual reveal of who was getting…