How I Met Your Mother - Season 4

So now I'm caught up. While the show has always been funny, only now does it seem to actually be getting somewhere with the actual supposed point of the whole thing, the story of the title. I'm curious how much planning has actually gone into this, because they started dropping hints about future events in the previous season, and really did it in earnest this time, but all of it seemed to culminate around the finale with very little that I can think of as far as suggestions for what's next, other that Bob Saget basically saying "No seriously, I'm getting to the point now". The whole season is basically life kicking the crap out of Ted in order to apparently get him to make a decision that will lead to him meeting his wife, though I can already see how they're going to continue pussy-footing around the issue with teases and fake outs.

One of the secretly most interesting things of watching this time was noticing all the ways they tried to hide the fact that both female leads were pregnant for at least part of the filming. Some worked, like when Lily wins an eating contest and has a resultant bulge, others not so much, like loose shirts and bags or boxes doing a fairly poor job of obscuring it. They even wrote Alyson Hannigan out for a few episodes when I guess it was especially bad. There's not a whole lot to say about the actual comedy, it's a nice mix of clever wordplay, snappy dialogue, and humorously over-elaborate rules, diagrams, and theories about dating. Just a couple days from when I'm writing about this until season five begins, and I couldn't have timed it better.