How I Met Your Mother vowed to stray away from the Ross Geller and Rachel Green trap from Friends, but they still fell into the plotline. How I Met Your Mother debuted one year after Friends’ decade-long run came to a conclusion. The CBS series from Carter Bays and Craig Thomas aired for nine years and it seemed like the series was going to stay away from the “will they or won’t they” situation with Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) and Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), but that turned out not to be the case.
One of the most memorable aspects of Friends was the lingering question about whether Ross and Rachel (David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston, respectively) would end up together. It remained a major plotline throughout the series after introducing the notion that Ross harbored feelings for Rachel from a young age. Over the course of the show, Ross and Rachel had a complicated on-again-off-again relationship that also featured a drunken marriage, divorce, and having a child together.
When How I Met Your Mother was kicking off, the show’s creators worried that the new show would constantly be squared up to Friends, especially when it came to the relationships. To nip that, it was revealed in the pilot that Ted had feelings for Robin but she was not the mysterious “Mother” character. This seemed to cement Robin as a platonic friend, but things changed. Ted and Robin still had an on-again-off-again relationship throughout the series, eventually getting together one final time in the series finale.
Ted And Robin Still Ended Up Together In HIMYM
Despite the early decision revealing that Robin wasn’t the love that Ted was looking for, the characters still fell into a Ross and Rachel situation. Ted and Robin entered a relationship by the end of How I Met Your Mother season 1. The pair broke up toward the back-end of the following season but after that, there was a bit of back and forth between the two characters. Even though the series claimed that Robin wasn’t the Mother, How I Met Your Mother still spent a lot of time teasing the fate of their relationship just as Friends did with Ross and Rachel.
The timing never seemed to match for Ross and Rachel, but the series finale brought the two together for the long-term. How I Met Your Mother, on the other hand, spent its final season introducing the Mother, Tracy McConnell. Then in a shocking turn of events, it revealed that Tracy had passed away and Ted found his way back to Robin in the end. The initial “will they or won’t they” vibe was justified since How I Met Your Mother still found its way into the trap whether the viewers supported the relationship or not.
Next: All The Clues To The Mother’s Death In How I Met Your Mother
