How I Met Your Mother is one of the absolute funniest shows on TV right now. The show sports a higher laugh-to-minute ratio than just about any other. The cast is top-notch and the writing is consistently smart and clever. But if you're new to the series, the newly released third season on DVD is not the best place to start.
You see, the show is told as one long story by a character named Ted Mosby (who's voice-over narration is provided by Bob Saget) talking to his kids in the year 2030 about his life back in the late 2000s and how he met their mother. Notice how I said that this was a "long" story because as of the end of the third season, although there is a strong possible lead, we still don't know who the titular "mother" is.
HIMYM is one of a new generation of TV sitcoms (like My Name Is Earl and Arrested Development) where things don't "reset" at the end of each episode but instead one episode flows the story into the next in a drawn-out, soap-opera fashion. Oh sure, there have been a lot of sitcoms in the past where not everything "resets" or a few "big" changes (weddings, babies, moving, etc.) carried over, but in these new sitcoms, if you miss out on one episode (just as with a drama like Lost or Heroes), there's a decent chance you missed out on something that's going to be referenced later.
If there's any one thing I can attribute to this narrative change its the boom of TV shows on DVD. Now, if you've missed a few seasons of a show or are, say, new entirely to HIMYM, you can simply rent or buy an entire season to watch at your leisure to catch up, which perhaps is the reason sitcom writers today feel more comfortable creating season-long story arcs if their shows are going to be seen less for individual episodes and more as whole seasons.
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