Friends. They’re both multi-camera sitcoms with a laughter track. They’re both set in New York City. They’re both about a group of friends that includes two college roommates, a married couple, an on/off couple, and a chauvinistic womanizer.
Along with those similarities come a lot of different ways the two shows can be compared. It’s not a black-and-white case of one show being clearly better than the other. Both shows have their own strengths and weaknesses. So, here are 5 Things Friends Did Better Than How I Met Your Mother (And 5 HIMYM Did Better).
Updated February 25th, 2020: The popularity of Friends and How I Met Your Mother continues to soar in the streaming age. Fans of these two shows continue to regularly re-binge reuniting for an unscripted special on HBO Max. As the debate over which New York-based ensemble sitcom is truly better rages on, we’ve updated this list with a few more entries.
HIMYM Did Better: Premise
Friends didn’t really have a premise. It was just a show about people hanging out in New York. How I Met Your Mother was also about people hanging out in New York, but it had a premise: an older Ted recounts to his kids the longest possible telling of the story of how he met their mom.
At times, this bordered on the far-fetched, as the story took nine years to tell, but it gave the show a direction. Friends was more aimless, because it wasn’t leading towards anything in particular.
Friends Did Better: Dialogue
Sitcoms are like joke machines. The trick with sitcom dialogue is to seamlessly move from joke to joke without losing sight of the fact that you’re writing a conversation. Due to How I Met Your Mother’s penchant for cutaway gags, the show’s dialogue often felt disted.
The writers of Friends, on the other hand, did a fantastic job of jumping from beat to beat in their dialogue. There were plenty of jokes laced into each scene, but the dialogue always felt like a more-or-less naturalistic conversation between friends.
HIMYM Did Better: College Flashbacks
Both Friends and How I Met Your Mother included flashbacks to the characters’ college days. In both cases, the fashion stylings of the younger characters were hilarious – from Ross’ mustache to Ted’s curly afro to Chandler’s Flock of Seagulls haircut – but on the whole, HIMYM’s flashbacks worked better.
Rather than focusing entire episodes on the characters’ college days, HIMYM would only occasionally flash back to Ted, Marshall, and Lily’s days at Wesleyan. With gags about Ted’s toxic relationship with Karen, his radio career under the pseudonym “Doctor X,” and “eating sandwiches,” HIMYM’s college flashbacks felt like a show of their own.
Friends Did Better: The Womanizer
Joey Tribbiani and Barney Stinson are the “womanizer” characters of their respective shows. Joey was hardly a perfect role model – he once seductively said, “How you doin’?” to baby Emma in a video that was going to be shown to her on her 18th birthday (when he would be in his fifties) – but he was nowhere near as depraved and disrespectful as Barney. Barney’s treatment of women was downright creepy.
HIMYM Did Better: Plot Twists
Both Friends and How I Met Your Mother took sharp left turns in their ongoing narratives that stunned fans. Examples from Friends include Monica and Chandler sleeping together, Ross saying, “...take thee Rachel,” and David’s move to Minsk.
Examples from HIMYM include Marshall’s dad’s death (foreshadowed by an episode-long countdown), Stella leaving Ted at the altar, and Lily temporarily breaking off her engagement to Marshall. These twists were both more unexpected and more hard-hitting than Friends’ twists.
Friends did better: The on/off romance
Both Friends and HIMYM have an on/off romance between two of its lead characters. Friends has Ross and Rachel, while HIMYM has Ted and Robin. Arguably, the TV viewing public was way more invested in Ross and Rachel than they were in Ted and Robin. Every Ross and Rachel development was a shocker: the Xerox girl, “Take thee Rachel,” the pregnancy.
Fans were hooked by their relationship right up to the end of the series. Meanwhile, Ted and Robin just kept breaking up and then kissing and getting back together and then breaking up again. It got to the point where fans would just roll their eyes.
HIMYM did better: Narrative structure
With its nonlinear narrative structures, jumping all over the place, and dovetailing story threads, HIMYM was always far better at telling stories than Friends. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that Friends was written for a live audience and filmed in front of a live audience, so it couldn’t really jump around and cut in and out of scenes in the way HIMYM does.
HIMYM was filmed without a live audience and then edited together and shown to audiences whose laughter was then recorded and played over the episodes. So, HIMYM was allowed more freedom. Still, this is undeniably one way it’s better.
Friends did better: Series finale
The series finale of How I Met Your Mother is infamously terrible, as the (SPOILER ALERT!) death of the titular mother is brushed over in a single line of voiceover narration after we’ve just spent the entire ninth season of the show getting to know her. Robin and Barney’s divorce is brushed over in a single scene as well, after we’ve just spent the entire ninth season waiting for their wedding.
Friends’ finale, on the other hand, is one of the best ever made. It might be a tad schmaltzy for some, but we get closure on all the characters’ journeys and we leave them in a happy place. That’s all fans ask for in a finale.
HIMYM did better: Character development
Sometimes in sitcoms, the characters don’t evolve between the first episode and the last episode. They stay exactly the same and never learn from their mistakes, because that’s the joke. But that only applies to sitcoms entirely bereft of drama with characters who are terrible people, like Seinfeld.
The problem with Friends is that it’s a show with drama and it wants you to think its characters are great people, but none of them change or mature throughout ten seasons. Joey’s the same lovable idiot, Phoebe’s the same hippie skeptic, and Rachel’s the same ditzy airhead (even though she did manage to land her dream job). Even Barney matures by the end when he has a baby.
Friends did better: Long-running storylines
Okay, the whole of How I Met Your Mother is technically a long-running storyline, beginning with older Ted telling his kids he’s going to tell them the story of how he met their mother and ending with (SPOILER ALERT!) her demise. But what Friends did better were multi-episode story arcs that spanned maybe ten or twenty episodes. How I Met Your Mother had a lot of those that didn’t land.
Fans who rewatch the series find themselves groaning at certain points in the show’s timeline – 'oh, great, it’s the Stella storyline' etc. There are only a few of those in Friends (the Emily storyline being one of them). Most of them – Phoebe’s pregnancy, Ross dating one of his students, the trip to Barbados etc. – work really well.