“I can’t peanut butter it in your ass.”

If you don’t watch How I Met Your Mother, I feel sorry for you. It’s one of the few shows out there that manages to leverage the classic multi-camera sitcom format, while keeping an ongoing storyline and having characters with real emotional weight. It’s one of those genuine shows that can make you laugh and make you really feel for the characters at the same time.

This year, the two main actresses on the show, Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders, both got pregnant mid-season, which was a tough logistical challenge for the show’s writers. Smulders isn’t showing too much thus far, but Hannigan had ballooned out and the last few weeks have barely managed to contain her baby belly. Some of the early attempts to explain Hannigan’s baby bump were very clever. Aside from the usual hiding of the stomach with a large purse, or a kitchen island, there was an episode where it was revealed that Lily, her character, was a former hotdog eating champion, which resulted in a few scenes of her, baby bump on display, scarfing down hotdogs. It’s funny to the audience, who is clearly aware of her real-life situation, but also serves a valid purpose. Tonight’s was even better.

In the opening scene, sitting in a bench at the gang’s favourite bar, she is told a joke that is referred to as “boy-funny.” The joke is quoted above, along with the punchline which the show refused to even utter. Upon hearing the punchline, Lily was so offended that she left. And as the narrator said “she didn’t talk to us for four weeks.” I’m guess there are four episode left in the season. In either case: Awesome.

Seriously? Chuck’s ratings keep dropping despite each new episode being better than the last. Chuck is demonstrably better than almost everything else on Monday nights. CBS’ comedy pairing of The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother is good, but I don’t think it surpasses Chuck. And the execrable dreck that is Dancing with the Stars is an unstoppable juggernaut of ratings, overpowering everything in its path. Why? I have no idea.

I don’t want to encourage viewers of TBBT or HIMYM to stop watching those shows because they’re both decent shows and HIMYM was on the verge of cancellation every year prior to this. And quite frankly, if you’re stupid enough to actually watch a full episode of Dancing with the Stars, I don’t want your eyes anywhere near Chuck. I’m afraid the stupid might leak. But there is one other show that pulls down strong numbers reliably that probably isn’t totally deserving of them.

I’m going to let the world in on a secret. House isn’t that good. I loved the first season. I have it on DVD, even though it’s shitty non-anamorphic widescreen. I liked the second season. The show had lost some of its charm, but House seemed to be developing as a character. By the third season I started to notice that despite every second episode ending with some significant moment implying that House would be changing nothing ever really changed. The show’s plot got tediously formulaic. House had to do more and more outrageous things to maintain his edginess. And the idea that House, no matter how brilliant he is, could keep his medical license after all the atrocious actions he’d commited more than strained credulity. So, near the end of season three I stopped watching it. When season four started up, I started to watch the premiere and I’m pretty sure I didn’t even make it through the whole thing.

I’m not against episodic television, where not much really changes from episode to episode. Obviously, I prefer serialized television because it allows bonds to be made between the characters and the audience, but I do watch a few shows with very little ongoing story. That said, I do not like shows that pretend that they’re serialized. It insults my intelligence and demeans the characters. And that’s what House does. The ongoing “developments” amount to nothing but the same cardboard cutout characters getting reset back to the status quo nearly every episode.

So stop watching House and give your television time to a show much much more deserving. Seriously.

I love television. In fact, many of my friends have told me, or have secretly wished they had the balls to tell me, that I have an unhealthy obsession with television. I watch more television on any given day than most people will in an entire week. Sitting down and watching an entire television series over the course of a few weeks is commonplace to me. I think it’s fair to say that television is kind of a big deal to me. Which is why what happened last night was very un-me.

Last night, I screwed up on the PVR set up when I went to record How I Met Your Mother and inadvertantly recorded Two and a Half Men. It suffices to say I was less than pleased. I went down to watch HIMYM, about twenty minutes into the episode, and saw no wonderul red light on my PVR. And screwing up on the PVR, or the PVR screwing me over, is not the atypical event, but rather what immediately followed it: I sat down and started watching the show.

Often, when I sit down to watch a show my dad will drift in and out of the room, he’ll pay attention for a couple minutes and then head off somewhere else, or even strike up a conversation with me when he knows he should at least wait until the commercial. Last night was the first time I ever “drifted in” to a tv show when it was a new episode. This isn’t the same as flipping to Space and seeing Picard digging a trench on Risa and sticking around for the rest. This is flicking to ABC and seeing John Locke igniting a stick of dynamite and, having missed what came before deciding “eh, what the fuck” and watching from there.

Granted, How I Met Your Mother isn’t quite as continuity reliant as Lost or some of my other favourite shows, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. I still haven’t seen the first two-thirds of that episode. Normally, I’d download the episode that night and watch it shortly after, but that night I sat my ass down and said “eh, what the fuck.” This won’t become a typical behaviour on my part if only because it felt so weird, even in the moment, to not know what had come before but the fact that it happened at all is a sign of my age. Or at least that I’m becoming more like my father, and who the hell knows which is the worse of those.