This is the second thing the writers did really well: the writers gave us a really, really powerful distraction.

Good fiction is made up of bad decisions.

Ted can’t tell a short version of a story to save his life, so this is the principle we’re learning: postponing a reveal.

Lily and Marshall’s wedding is finally here, and since this is a sitcom, you know absolutely everything is going to go wrong.

If you’ve gotten to the end of the story, and you don’t feel like you’ve earned it, you need to back up.

This week, we’re talking about closeness and how these storylines demonstrate that these characters are now closer than ever.

To get a story, you have to dig. Either dig into the past, asking “but why?” or “but how?” or dig into the future by asking “so what?”.

This week, we “plop” you right into the episode without giving you any backstory. This is a concept that writers refer to as “in media...

Once again, Ted opens this episode with an ominous teaser. “Life was good. But everything was about to change.” He’s telling us the...

This episode opens at the bar, where we learn that Ted is turning 28. He gets some food and Lily feels the need to touch the plate to...

This episode opens up with Lily and Marshall rushing to book their dream wedding venue. They have this really funny scene where they are...

This is the only episode in the entire series to start with “previously”s. It shows some background info: Ted is in a long-distance...

This episode starts on Marshall as a kid, reading a book about an anthropologist studying gorillas. Then he takes her seminar and she...

Ted and Victoria are actually only on screen together for 122 seconds total throughout this entire episode.

This was written as a possible series finale, and that’s the question that Ted has to answer again and again in this series.

This "Yes, but... No, and..." trick is a good way to check your Try/Fail cycles and keep tension in your story.

Warning: once you know about Bottle Episodes, it's impossible to stop seeing them everywhere.

Ted starts doing shots of something mysterious and then remembers nothing. He wakes up with a pineapple.

Ted opens this episode with the line, "Some stories end with people getting hurt, and none of it would have happened if it weren’t for that

In order for Ted to lick the Liberty Bell, basically everything has to go wrong, though.