On How I Met Your Mother (no spoilers)

So I guess How I Met Your Mother ended last night. I didn't see it. I haven't watched the show in at least a year and a half, and I stopped caring about it long before that. But there was a time when I wholeheartedly endorsed it as probably the best show on television. So what happened?

How I Met Your Mother was a well-written show with a cast of well-developed cast of characters, unfortunately based on a ridiculous premise that was doomed to failure. Some of the episodes were so funny I thought I'd die laughing, and some of the moments were so poignant and real that I'm not sure they belonged in a comedy at all.  For the first five or six seasons, it was fun to watch the relationships develop between the characters, see them grow and change as people, and get fun glimpses at their lives before (and sometimes after) the years chronicled by the show. There were running gags and "inside" jokes that made the characters feel like real people who I really knew, and that was the brilliance of the show. Unfortunately, it was not set up to be successful for more than five or six seasons because at that point, no one really cared about who these kids' mother was and the jokes started getting overdone and stale. But that's not exactly why stopped caring about it.

Like I said, I felt like these were real people who I was getting to know better as the show went on. Eventually, I began to realize how little I had in common with any of them. And then, as they got older and more crass and obnoxious, I stopped liking them at all. So I really didn't care who married who or how they met or if they all were still friends years later because I didn't care about them as people. This is truth in real life and in TV shows: there is only so long you can live a life completely focused on self, pleasure, and fun, before it starts to wear thin and get really old, really sad, and really ugly. That is what happened with How I Met Your Mother. At some point I realized I was no longer entertained by the ridiculously self-focused lives of the characters. And that's when I was done with the show.

I've seen some of the reactions to the finale. I actually don't know what happened, but I'm not worried about spoilers because I'm not even remotely curious about it, and I don't care. I used to be a fan of How I Met Your Mother, and now I'm just glad that I never have to hear about it again. And you know, maybe that says more about me than it says about the show. I guess I'm okay with that.