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Dude, don’t leave a bro hanging… even for Mandy Moore.

We don’t usually tune in to three-camera sitcoms for unmitigated truth, and yet last night when I pulled up the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother I was treated to nothing but. There is an emotional honesty to this show that you simply don’t find in many comedies these days. The Office has it, but that’s also what they’re selling. HIMYM is far slyer about it mixing large levels silliness into the mix so that we never forget we’re watching a comedy, not an after-school-special. More after the jump…

Maybe it’s because Ted’s particular predicament happens to mirror my own at the moment. One of the first things we learn he did after breaking up with Robin in last season’s finale was grow out his “breakup beard.” This struck me as exceptionally funny as I sat on my bed stroking the finely groomed growth on my face. This also led to a string of facial hair related jokes (my favorite of all physical appearance based gags) ending with Barney saying, “Great point, Persian nightclub owner” of Ted’s awesome ’stache (though to be honest, the line did smack of something Jason Segal had brought over from the Knocked Up set).

The resulting “race to win the breakup” once Robin shows up with Gaél (Male-Gail) seemed particularly spot-on. If anything in this episode I love how a typical breakup was portrayed not a quick band-air tear where everyone goes back to being happy and affable and capable of returning to the way life was the day before, and it isn’t usually a mess of screaming and feathers. It’s somewhere in the middle, and it’s complicated — might even involve a somewhat unrecognizable Mandy Moore, though rarely in my experience.

Outside of all the emotional honesty of the episode, were several really great laughs, though I’ve recently noticed that I’m responding more to those little things than the actual joke itself. Take for example later in the episode where Ted has yet to realize he got a “tramp stamp” on his lower back. In order to show Barney Marshall calls to Ted in the kitchen and asks him to grab the fondue pot for him. Now the joke is obviously that reaching for this item on the top shelf will reveal a delightful little butterfly etched onto the small of his back, but for me the notion that these guys would even have a fondue pot, let alone need it in the middle of the morning was shear brilliance.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention Marshall’s pre-close threat to Barney, pointing him to SlapCountdown.com. I love a good web-stunt as much as the next guy, but it seems near impossible to live up to hype that will surround this (at least amongst the HIMYM faithful), then again I have no reason to start doubting now. Should be yet another great season.

Note: the countdown is scheduled to end on Monday, November 19th — hte last week of fall sweeps [natch].

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 10:08 am and is filed under CBS, How I Met Your Mother. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.