Neil Patrick Harris Thinks Ted Made Up A Lot Of HIMYM Barney Stories

How I Met Your Mother star Neil Patrick Harris thinks a lot of the show’s Barney stories were made up. Harris played the womanizing friend of protagonist Ted (Josh Radner) throughout the sitcom’s nine seasons, from 2005-14. The series ended up winning ten Primetime Emmys over the course of its run, with Harris being nominated four times for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.

Framed as the story Ted is telling to his children in the year 2030, How I Met Your Mother is centered around his tumultuous dating life, as well as the lives of his closest friends. Of those, Barney Stinson is considered the breakout character, positioned through most of the show as an unapologetic playboy who employs increasingly convoluted strategies to sleep with women. While the series does explore more serious sides to his character, his outrageous stories are most frequently played for comedy, as are his array of catchphrases.

Viewers are led to believe certain elements of Barney’s life are outright fictions, but in an interview with The Guardian, Harris suggests they should be doubting even more than they already do. When prompted by the notion that his character’s views towards women haven’t aged particularly well, he says he believes that much of what was shown didn’t actually happen, and was instead a product of the framing device. With Future Ted narrating the story, Harris believes much of what fans see of Barney is the protagonist’s projection of his single friend:

Well, my take on How I Met Your Mother is that it was not all real. The structure of the show is future Ted telling his children the story. In doing so, he’s fictionalizing the narrative and he’s talking about his friend who was the wing man, the buddy, the guy that was always wanting to party and have fun and make any experience an event. So, I think of Barney as this weird anti‑superhero, who when he failed would just make up a story to make him succeed.

Harris’ comment is ultimately ambiguous about who is doing the lying, though it’s very possible that both Barney and Ted are guilty of it to some degree. It’s an established feature of How I Met Your Mother that Barney likes to embellish his life story to seem more impressive, but these stories are usually called out within the narrative, suggesting that Ted recognizes them to be false. While the narrator could certainly be inventing them on his own, were Barney to have lied about a lot of his escapades, it’s possible Ted’s image of his bachelor friend compelled him to believe them and pass them off as true in his retelling.

That many of the heightened elements of Barney’s character could have an in-world explanation, rather than them stemming from his being part of a sitcom, is certainly an interesting wrinkle for How I Met Your Mother fans to consider. Ted’s friends do take on more symbolic significance based on their roles in his life, with Barney offering a conflicting philosophy of relationships to Marshall (Jason Segel) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan), who are often framed in terms of their marriage. It would be interesting to imagine just how much of Barney’s life depicted in the show “actually happened,” and what he might’ve looked like if another character was narrating instead.

Source: The Guardian

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