How I Met Your Mother Josh Radnor star has a theory behind backlash to that divisive final episode

The How I Met Your Mother finale has been hailed as one of the most controversial in TV and star Josh Radnor thinks he knows why.

In the last episode it was finally revealed that Tracy (Cristin Milioti) was the children’s mother and the woman Ted Moseby (Josh’s character) ended up marrying.

Unfortunatel,y when viewers thought they were going to properly meet her after almost a decade, Ted confirmed that she had died six years previously.

This is when he finally asks his children if he could move on with Robin (Cobie Smulders) and find love again.

After his co-star Cobie Smulders defended the last ever instalment, Josh said he believes fans found it easier to be angry about the ending instead of being sad the show was over.

‘Anger is an easier emotion than grief,’ Radnor explained.

‘People were more comfortable being angry than sad. They were sad their favourite show was ending, and they were sad it didn’t end the way they wanted it to.’

‘Rather than sit with the feelings of sadness or loss — which is what [creators] Carter [Bays] and Craig [Thomas] were asking people to sit with…not everyone was up for that,’ he told Comicbook.com.

For years, viewers rallied around the idea of Robin being the children’s mother but instead, she married Barney (Neil Patrick Harris).

Even though some fans of the series did end up falling in love with the mother, Tracy (Cristin Milioti), this makes it feel like her sudden death would have been better introduced earlier on.

The programme, which ran from 2005 to 2014, was unique because it had written its ending years in advance and filmed core scenes at the show’s beginning.

This is because the scenes with Ted Moseby’s children, to who he was telling the story of how he met their mother, needed to be filmed ahead of time so that they didn’t age in the show.

Josh may have a point but there are lots of fans who would disagree with his interpretation.

They could argue that because the ending was written for the show at its beginning, it didn’t suit the path the show ending up going on.

As the years since the finale aired continue to climb, Josh hopes viewers will be kinder to the shows ending.

How I Met Your Mother is available to stream on Netflix UK.

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