How I Met Your Mother Thinks You Didn't Watch Friends

My very favourite sitcom of all time -- the one I've watched the most; the one about which I know the most trivia -- is Friends. And the Friends episode I love above all others is "The One With The Embryos." If the title doesn't ring a bell, that's because it derives from the lesser of the episode's plotlines: Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) getting implanted with embryos so that she can be a surrogate for her brother Frank (Giovanni Ribisi) and his wife Alice (Mary Jo Rupp). In the main storyline, Joey and Chandler (Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry) face off against Rachel and Monica (Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox) in a trivia battle designed by Ross (David Schwimmer) to determine which pair knows more about the other; though at first it's a straight cash bet, Chandler and Monica goad each other into betting the girls' apartment against the continued residence, across the hall, of the guys' chick and duck.

I feel I can say without hyperbole that it's the single most perfectly realized storylines in sitcom history. So I guess I can't blame How I Met Your Mother for shamelessly ripping it off for last night's episode. In "Who Wants To Be A Godparent?," Marshall (Jason Segel) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan) must confront the issue of their mortality and the disposition of their new son Marvin in the event of their untimely death. To determine which of their friends -- Ted, Robin, or Barney (Josh Radnor, Cobie Smulders, and Neil Patrick Harris) -- is best suited to take over Marvin's care if Marshall and Lily die, they design a quiz, in the format of a game show, to test everyone's parenting potential.

Two shows took a stab at the "friends playing a pretend game show" storyline. Who wrote it better?

Who Did It First?

"The One With The Embryos" aired January 15, 1998, giving the producers of How I Met Your Mother nearly fifteen years to study it.

Winner: Friends.

Who Did It Funnier?

Here's HIMYM:

And here's Friends.

Winner: Friends, and it's not even kind of close. All the HIMYM cutaways really slow down the proceedings.

Who Made It More Believable?

Ross's game in "Embryos" is supposed to have been thrown together over the course of a morning, so he uses coloured index cards (on some of which he's drawn a little bolt of lightning for the lightning round, because just because you're in a hurry doesn't mean you shouldn't have some pride of ownership) and a piece of bristol board. Though Marshall has, in the past, demonstrated his willingness to use his corporate graphics department to print large tables and graphs for the sake of comedy bits, it's not quite credible that he and Lily -- with their newborn baby -- would go to the trouble of building a game wheel.

Winner: Friends.

Whose Stakes Were Higher?

Even a childless interior design junkie can't deny that the welfare of a child is a bigger deal than who gets to live in a nice apartment.

Winner: How I Met Your Mother.

Whose Outcome Was More Satisfying?

Though it ended up being undone a few episodes later, the result of the Friends trivia contest did require Rachel and Monica to live in Joey and Chandler's shitty apartment, and deal with the consequences: scary things in the guys' kitchen drawers; light switches that, infuriatingly, apparently do nothing; Monica's having to give up her position as the default hostess. The godparent game ends prematurely when people lose the will to continue playing it, and Marshall and Lily finally decide that Marvin's guardianship will be shared by all three of their best friends. Both a cop-out and impractical!

Winner: Friends.

So...Who Wrote It Better?

I'm not a knee-jerk HIMYM hater, though Ted certainly is taking an incredibly long time to tell this stupid story and the show could have ended about two seasons ago without anyone getting too mad about it, including me. And I get that, if you're going to steal from another show, you might as well steal from the very best. But there's no way HIMYM could have topped "The One With The Embryos," and putting itself in a position to allow viewers to draw direct comparisons was a real tactical error.

Winner: Friends.