How British TV Killed the American Sitcom with Barney Stinson

Since the invention of television, the US of A has created countless godawful feel good family sitcoms. Cringeworthy, with an all too wholesome moral conclusion to every episode, the generic, formulaic sitcom has plagued screens globally for decades.

However, there have been some gems. The fifties brought us the iconic Phil Silvers Show, with the following decade introducing us to the more far-fetched adventures of Samantha Stevens in Bewitched, as well as the creepy adventures of The Munsters and The Addams Family. 

And then we fast forward to the nineties, when the adventures of everyone's favourite Friends filled our screens. Friends was a show that gripped the world, making its stars the highest paid television actors of the time (a claim recently surpassed by the leads of The Big Bang Theory). It was a show that made us laugh, made us cry and genuinely defined a generation of coffee-slurping yuppies.

Many will argue that Friends has yet to be beaten in its position as "Greatest American Sitcom Ever", but over the last ten years, there have certainly been a few contenders, for me, they are Scrubs, The Big Bang Theory, and the truly fantastic How I Met Your Mother.

The problem is, with their critical acclaim and popularity across the pond, these shows suffered the same fate as the final few series of Friends. That fate is, of course, endless reruns on digital television,

Now, the rerunning of a great show is not in itself an issue. The thing to remember, however, is that the reason we love these shows so very much is that we engage with them. And how do we do that? We grow to love the characters as the characters grow themselves.

As such, showing random, unconnecting episodes is NOT the way to get your audience involved!

I have met so very many people who claim to hate the three aforementioned shows simply because they have only seen a couple of disjointed episodes. Take any drama, and you need to watch it in chronological order in order to follow the story arcs. Would you watch a handful of random out-of-order episodes of a soap opera and expect to enjoy it? Of course not. So how on earth do the gods of scheduling expect to attract new audiences by throwing random chapters of the greater story at the general public?

Why does the finale (let's forget about "season nine") of Scrubs still to this day reduce me to a blubbering wreck? Because I watched it in order! Why do I find myself holding back the tears at almost every single new episode of How I Met Your Mother? Because over the last nine years, I have grown with these characters and they have grown with me. These shows are well thought out and beautifully crafted. So don't fuck with them! There's a reason they are great, E4, and you are single-handedly destroying them, just like you did with Friends.

So to those of you out there eagerly awaiting the final episode in the life of Ted Mosby next week, then like me I'm sure you have a couple of boxes of Kleenex already on standby. And to those of you who have not yet discovered the comfort that lies within the walls of McClaren's pub, then switch off your freeview boxes and go and buy the first season of How I Met Your Mother. You won't regret it. It's freakin' legen....