As with most things, I am usually late to the party. I may wear Good Will sweaters and hipster glasses, but I won’t claim to have liked things before they were cool, because the sad truth is, I don’t hear of them before they were cool, while they were cool and usually have jumped on the band wagon after people have rapidly begun to fall off.

That being said, with television especially, I am terrible at finding shows I like. Often times they have long since been over, or are nearing their final seasons before I discover them. The same can be said for the long running and wildly popular How I Met Your Mother. I have many friends who have been talking about this show for a long time now, some of which were talking about it before it even ended. Yet here I am, just finding the show.

A friend last semester recapped the general plot of the show one day, when he came into a class pontificating about who the Mother was and how sad he was for his favorite show to be coming to an end. When he described it to me, I wrote him off. Maybe it was his plot summary or my mood and annoyance at hearing everyone talk about this Mother as if she were their own mother, but I decided that show wasn’t something I would find funny or interesting.

Time to eat crow. When television shows join Netflix, It’s as if they gain a second wind. They pick up an audience who has already lived and loved the show through its seasons, and then it picks up a group of followers who, for whatever reason, missed the show during its original run, and that’s where it gets dangerous.

As college students we know the dangers of binge watching television shows, and we don’t care. So, as I sat down the other day I began my journey into How I Met Your Mother, or as the more devout followers refer to it as HIMYM, because everything in our generation has an acronym or abbreviation (i.e. PSL).

Well ladies and gentlemen, I am in love. Alyson Hannigan from Buffy is in this show, another show that I was very, very late to, along with Neil Patrick Harris. Where have I been since 2005, when this show began, and how did I miss it for so long?

While it does start off rocky as the cast works to get the chemistry up and the story gets its feet under itself, it’s easy to see why this show ran for nine seasons. A pretty solid accomplishment for a television series, but the audience had to know who the mother was, and they were willing to stick around that long, and they seem as though they could have sat through nine more seasons.

As the plot progresses, I do find myself becoming more and more attached to the plot of the show and its characters. Overall, I can see why the show was watched so faithfully by so many for so long and why it’s getting this second wind of hype thanks to the ever-popular Netflix.