Interpreting Gender Roles in 'How I Met Your Mother'

Analysis of Gender Roles in How I Met Your Mother

One of the most popular television series of this decade is Carter Bays and Craig Thomas’, How I Met Your Mother. The aspect of the show that makes it so popular, is it’s unique characters. Each of the five main characters have several different personality traits and niches that make them each so different. The three characters within the show that this analysis will focus on are Ted, Robin, and Barney. All of the aforementioned characters have their own quirks and specific traits that make them the opposite of typical men and women portrayed in mass media. How I Met Your Mother is about the main character, Ted, telling his children the elaborate story of how he met their mother. Within Ted’s complex story are the other four characters; Robin, Ted’s other love interest throughout the show and a career woman, Barney, a womanizing alcoholic, and self proclaimed best friend of Ted, and Marshall and Lilly, the long standing couple within the show and Ted’s actual best friends. While Marshall and Lilly are important characters to the story, they are not a focal point of this analysis. The first character of this analysis will be Barney. Barney, like stated earlier, is a womanizing

Ted is a unique character in the sense that he does not fall into any category of male stereotypes. Throughout the show he is attempting to find himself, in the process of finding his wife, thus he goes through several different phases and personality changes. An article written by Martha M. Lauzen, David M. Dozier, and Nora Horan, called Constructing Gender Stereotypes Through Social Roles in Prime-Time Television, discusses the gender roles displayed in prime time television. The premise of How I Met Your Mother goes against one of the main points made by the article. It states that, “the marital status of female characters was more likely to