The Problem with Barney Stinson

I watched the first two episodes of the new season of How I Met Your Mother last week. I liked both episodes quite a bit. They felt like vintage How I Met Your Mother with good chemistry among the cast members and a lot of amusing cut-aways and skipping of time. I feel mostly positive about the direction the show is taking after a mostly wretched fifth season and a sixth season that was an improvement, but still lackluster.

However, I still have a problem with Barney Stinson.

Barney is a character who’s been bugging me for awhile now. I tried to ignore that bug because he’s played by Neil Patrick Harris and NPH is simply delightful on this show. He wasn’t the reason I started watching the show in the first place – that would be Jason Segel, for my love for Freaks and Geeks runs deep – but he is the one who kept me watching. Barney did so many wacky things, and that’s what made him fun! Barney’s the best, isn’t he?

Well, after six seasons, I’m no longer thinking that he’s the best. In fact, Barney Stinson is kind of a feminist’s nightmare.

Really, the fact that Barney Stinson is No Good for Women has been established from day one. He makes up identities and ridiculous lies to get women into bed. The writers established this character trait in the pilot. It’s not a surprise that Barney doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to respecting women. So why did I have such affection for him in the beginning?

Because in the first few seasons of How I Met Your Mother, the womanizer part of Barney wasn’t his dominant character trait.

Oh sure, Barney slept around, and sure, Barney lied to women. He also played extensive games of laser tag that he took completely seriously and involved himself in many a wacky scheme that had nothing to do with getting laid.

In the third episode of season one, his main goal was to have a wild night with Ted and he didn’t care what made it wild as long as the night was memorable. When his scheme to pick up two women didn’t work, he moved onto the next challenge, and by the end of the episode his main goal was to lick the Liberty Bell, because no one had ever done it before.

A few episodes later, Barney was creating a scheme to get himself out of boring dates. He called this scheme the “lemon law” after the law regarding car purchasers and broke up dates with women after a mere five minutes, citing said lemon law. When a woman rejected him, citing the lemon law, he wasn’t disappointed that he was shot down. He was just happy that the lemon law had become a “thing,” and that he had succeeded in his quest to make it a “thing.”

The commitment to seeing an idea through, no matter how ridiculous the idea was – the very essential “Challenge Accepted!” aspect of Barney – was what elevated him beyond the typical sleazy womanizer sitcom character. He wasn’t just the guy who wanted to get laid a lot. He was also the guy who invented the Thankstini (potato vodka, cranberry juice, and a bullion cube), who teased Marshall mercilessly about getting painted nude (but still wanted a nude painting of his own), who set Ted’s coat on fire and justified it by saying it wasn’t “real suede” but merely a blend, who went on The Price is Right because he thought Bob Barker was his father and gave all of his winnings to Marshall and Lily for their wedding.

I didn’t mind Barney’s womanizing side too much because there was more to him than that. He wasn’t just a ladies’ man. He was a schemer who wanted to play tricks and see if they worked. He was a rare deviance from the man-child stereotype in that he actually seemed to work – working doing morally reprehensible things, but he still had a job.

His womanizing stopped being funny to me by the end of the season 3 episode “The Bracket,” after he and the gang try to search for the woman who’s been trashing his name all over town. They actually took part in a NCAA-style bracket to narrow down the person who had the best reason to be mad at him. They ran through some of his wackiest schemes – pretending to be Jorge Posada, “you have my dead wife’s kidney,” “fake baby” (whatever that is), having an evil twin named Larney – and included a scene where he and Robin staged a flirtation and had some smoking hot chemistry.

That was one of my favorite episodes of the season, but after I was done laughing, I thought to myself, “After they spent a whole episode about his womanizing, they really need to focus on a different aspect of his character, because they’ve hit their comedic peak with this joke.”

I turned out to be right. They spent the rest of season three and all of season four setting up a much different character arc for Barney, showing him gaining maturity and falling in love with Robin. By the end of season four, he and Robin had gotten together…and there was much rejoicing, especially from the viewers who had wanted them together since season one’s “The Return of the Shirt.”

Then, early in season five, the writers supposedly realized that they missed writing Barney as a womanizing asshole, and/or realized they didn’t know how to write an atypical romantic relationship that didn’t end in marriage and children, so they broke up Barney and Robin and reverted the character to a womanizing asshole.

The problem is, you can’t develop a comic character into a Real Boy and then regress that character. A character who behaves badly is funny if he continues to behave badly, and a character who matures into a more responsible, caring person but retains a childlike wickedness is funny, but a character who matures and then regresses is no longer funny. He’s no longer a funny asshole. He’s just an asshole. And watching Barney regress was painful to watch, not only because the “womanizing asshole” aspect becaume his dominant personality trait, but because he was flaunting these sexcapades in front of Robin, treating his ex-girlfriend like crap.

The writers managed to rehabilitate Barney somewhat in season six by showing that a lot of his worst traits were due to his unresolved father issues – a rather tired trope, but one that had been established very early in the show’s run, so it didn’t feel like a cheap trick. It felt organic, especially considering the hackjob they’d done to the character in season five. What also helped was having Neil Patrick Harris play Barney and John Lithgow play his estranged father. The acting went a long way in making the storyline believable and touching.

So, okay. Barney has issues with women and intimacy because of his abandonment issues and his mom being very, ahem, promiscuous. (Oh, boy, speaking of characters that are feminist nightmares…) That makes sense. And now he’s facing those intimacy issues with Nora, a traditional but strong woman who he dated for awhile in the sixth season. And there’s a chance that she might be the woman he marries somewhere along the line!

Wait, what’s that sound? That’s the sound of me barfing.

See, it’s not enough that Barney may or may not be rekindling his romance with Nora. Robin has also rediscovered her feelings for him. And guess what – the season premiere left us unsure of which woman he’s marrying! It’s a love triangle for the ages! You know why it’s a love triangle for the ages? Because I can’t think of a single scenario that I like – only ones that I hate, and ones that I hate less.

First, let’s acknowledge right away that the last thing this show needs is a second “who is this character marrying?” mystery when we still have no farking clue who “Your Mother” is.

Second, there are so many things wrong with a Barney-marrying-Nora situation. There’s the implication that the love of a good, traditional woman is going to reform a womanizing scoundrel. There’s the implication that marriage itself is the way to reform a womanizing scoundrel. There’s the implication that Nora was the only one “good enough” to reform Barney, not like those dumb hos he used to sleep with. And there’s my pettier feeling of annoyance that I turned out to make an incorrect prediction about the show’s plot – I was convinced that Nora would turn out to be the Mother and marry Ted, and I don’t like being wrong.

Third, there’s the scenario that Barney will wind up marrying Robin. I prefer this scenario to a Barney/Nora scenario; the characters seem better suited for each other, the actors have much better chemistry, and I’m still a bit nostalgic about the early potential of Barney/Robin. But after watching the fifth season, where Barney cavalierly ignored Robin’s hurt feelings and flaunted his conquests in her face, I’m really not excited about watching her pine for him. I also don’t like the idea of two characters initially opposed to traditional marriages and relationships ending up in a traditional marriage, as though marrying is always a sign of maturity and growth, not just a personal preference.

Finally – and this is the real heart of the problem – I dislike, on principle, the idea of a womanizing jerk like Barney Stinson in the middle of a love triangle, as though he’s reformed so much that he now deserves to have two women in love with him.

This taste is bitter, my friends.