5 How I Met Your Mother Episodes That Have Aged the Worst

When “How I Met Your Mother” arrived on CBS in 2005, television — and pop culture — looked very different. George W. Bush was in the White House, YouTube was just beginning to change the internet, and the “Star Wars” prequels were still fresh in the cultural conversation. Viewed through that lens, it is a little easier to understand why certain “How I Met Your Mother” episodes have aged so poorly.

The CBS sitcom, created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, was built around a deceptively simple premise: Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), a hopeless romantic living in New York City, tells his children the sprawling story of how he met their mother. In the future-set framing device, Ted’s kids are forced to listen as their father recounts years of dating disasters, friendships, and life lessons. For reasons the show never really explains, older Ted is voiced by the late Bob Saget. Along the way, viewers follow Ted and his core group: Marshall Eriksen and Lily Aldrin (Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan), womanizing showman Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), and Ted’s longtime love interest Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders). Some episodes, including fan favorite “Slap Bet,” still hold up surprisingly well. Others are much harder to defend today.

With that in mind, here are five “How I Met Your Mother” episodes that have become difficult to watch years after they first aired. The choices are not ranked, and yes, a few come from the show’s later run — including its ninth and final season, which aired in 2014. These are the “How I Met Your Mother” installments that modern viewers may want to skip entirely.

It remains baffling that Season 9’s “Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra” made it to air, both from creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas and from CBS. The episode is especially frustrating because it is tied to one of the sitcom’s most beloved running jokes: the long-running slap bet between Marshall and Barney, which gives Marshall the right to slap Barney five times whenever he chooses. Earlier slap bet episodes delivered some of the show’s biggest laughs. This one, whose title nods to W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Appointment in Samarra,” takes a disastrous turn with a so-called kung fu storyline that puts the main cast in racist costumes and makeup widely criticized as yellowface. None of the principal “How I Met Your Mother” actors are Asian.

The backlash to the episode was significant enough that Bays later addressed the controversy in a now-deleted social media statement reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Writing on behalf of himself and Thomas, he said:

“With Monday’s episode, we set out to make a silly and unabashedly immature homage to Kung Fu movies, a genre we’ve always loved. But along the way we offended people. We’re deeply sorry, and we’re grateful to everyone who spoke up to make us aware of it. We try to make a show that’s universal, that anyone can watch and enjoy. We fell short of that this week, and feel terrible about it. To everyone we offended, I hope we can regain your friendship, and end this series on a note of goodwill. Thanks.”

The apology acknowledged the criticism, but it did not erase the episode itself. Anyone revisiting the rocky ninth season of “How I Met Your Mother” would be wise to move past this one without pressing play.

Then there is “Last Forever,” the two-part “How I Met Your Mother” series finale that remains one of the most controversial sitcom endings of the 21st century. The finale attempts to tie together nearly every major storyline, from Marshall’s dream of becoming a judge to Lily’s opportunity to work in Rome as an art curator for a wealthy patron. It also races through major developments from the later seasons, including the collapse of Robin and Barney’s marriage.

Regarding that last thing? The entire ninth season of “How I Met Your Mother” takes place on Robin and Barney’s wedding weekend, so it’s unbelievably infuriating to split them up within the first few minutes of “Last Forever,” as is the choice to kill off the titular Mother — Cristin Milioti’s unbelievably charming Tracy McConnell — to pave the way for Ted to woo Robin with the same blue French horn he foisted upon her in Season 1. “Last Forever” is annoying, unfunny, and unfulfilling, but as with many entries on this list, the biggest problem is actually Barney.

After his split from Robin, Barney returns almost immediately to his womanizing ways and ends up finding out that one of his random paramours is pregnant; when he sees his baby daughter, he becomes a changed man. That sounds nice, right? Wrong! Instead of just trying to become a better person, Barney “changes” by going to bars and chastising women for drinking alcohol and wearing short skirts. Not only is this pivot stupid, it’s pretty offensive … and a terrible conclusion to Barney’s story. Frankly, we wish Barney had an original ending — but at least Ted and Tracy do.

Barney Stinson is … an ongoing issue on “How I Met Your Mother.” This isn’t the fault of Neil Patrick Harris’ excellent and gamely committed performance, but the way the character was written; by modern standards, Barney is an enormously problematic figure whose entire life revolves around literally tricking women into sleeping with him by any means necessary. Let’s start with “The Playbook,” a Season 5 episode of “How I Met Your Mother” that shines a pretty harsh light on the ways Barney will lie and cheat to get women into bed.

Unfortunately, this episode is also really funny at first glance and so beloved by fans that it resulted in a real “Playbook” being released as merchandise … but if you spend any time at all thinking about it, it’s not great. When “The Playbook” begins, Barney is sitting in the gang’s usual haunt, the bar MacLaren’s, in a full scuba suit, leading Lily to confront a curious woman named Claire (Sarah Wright) and try to deter her from talking to Barney.

As the half-hour unfolds, we learn about Barney’s titular playbook and several of the “plays” found within, including a devious long con called “The Lorenzo von Matterhorn” that he uses to fool Lily’s coworker Shelly (guest star Eva Amurri). Others include “The Empire State Building” (where he comforts women whose long-lost loves aren’t meeting them at the iconic New York building) and the “Mrs. Stinsfire” (a much weirder spin on “Mrs. Doubtfire”), which the gang discovers when Lily enlists an actress friend to seduce Barney and steal the book. So how does this all end? With Lily sticking up for Barney and encouraging Claire to give him a chance … which turns out to be another gambit. Feels gross!

Another Barney-centric episode that seems great at first and feels a lot more unsettling once you think more about it, “The Bracket,” a half-hour from the show’s third season, is literally just a laundry list of horrifying things Barney has done to former lovers. When a woman approaches Lily at MacLaren’s to warn her that she should stay away from Barney (something the show reverses in the aforementioned episode “The Playbook”), erroneously thinking that Lily and Barney might be on a date, Barney is baffled … largely because there’s too many women that he wronged and can’t figure out who it might be. Armed with six packs of beer and a stolen blackboard, Barney enlists the gang to figure out who the woman could be, and after they narrow it down to a few possibilities, Barney brings Lily with him to help identify the culprit — and promises Lily, in the process, that he’ll apologize to his victim.

Some of Barney’s lies are at least vaguely innocuous, like when he hooked up with a girl and pretended he was Ted or when he hooked up with a different girl inside of Lily and Marshall’s new apartment before they moved in, pretending it was his. A different conquest, Holly (Maite Schwartz), met a worse fate: he abandoned her in the woods after seducing her during a camping trip, and she was nearly killed by a bear. Then, when Barney meets a girl he apparently forgot he slept with, he apologizes for a litany of misdeeds including a tale that … really makes it sound like he participated in human trafficking, which is played off as a joke. Barney’s behavior is unacceptable, but episodes like “The Bracket” try too hard to turn his crimes against women into silly goofs.

Weirdly, the gambit that gives the “How I Met Your Mother” episode “The Naked Man” its very blunt title isn’t from Barney Stinson’s horrible, twisted mind; it comes from a guest character, Mitch, played by Adam Paul. At this point in the series, Ted and Robin are roommates out of pure convenience, and he’s very surprised to arrive home one day and find a fully nude Mitch. As Mitch explains, he and Robin were out on a blind date that wasn’t going very well, so he tried a tried-and-true tactic he calls “The Naked Man,” which is … exactly what it sounds like. Mitch tells Ted that he does this on a lot of dates when the energy flags for a few reasons — the target in question either thinks you’re really confident or feels sorry for you, both of which Mitch claims lead them to want to sleep with you. He does warn Ted, though, that it only ever works every two out of three times.

Buoyed by this idea, the gang decides to try it out. Ted uses it, successfully, to seduce Vicky (Courtney Ford), a woman he always sees in the elevator at his office building; he almost aborts the mission to be respectful towards Vicky at her home, but when he realizes she’s a weird racist, he does it and succeeds. Lily uses it on Marshall, which is sort of cheating because they’re married; Barney gets kicked out of a woman’s apartment naked. That’s how the episode shakes out, but honestly — in what world is The Naked Man not a form of sexual harassment or outright assault? Do not try this one in real life, folks. You’ll probably get arrested, which is what should have happened to Ted and Barney.