In honor of the Three Strike Rule’s move to Mondays, I want to highlight the best series airing on Monday nights. No, I’m not talking about Heroes, which pretty much blew for the duration of its 13-episode run in the fall. That they managed to make Kristen Bell seem like a mediocre actress only drives home how badly the producers of Heroes need to get their act together or risk losing even more viewers next year. Instead, I am speaking of CBS’s How I Met Your Mother, the funny, smart sitcom on CBS that has just switched to a new timeslot (8:30 PM Mondays). I own a TiVo, but I still manage to watch this series within 15 minutes of its airing. Why? Plain and simple: Character development. I’ve grown to love the characters on How I Met Your Mother and look forward to their exploits each week — and the mystery of just who Ted will end up with as his future wife (and the “mother” of the show’s name) has kept me tuned in for three years.

Wait, rewind — let’s go over a few things for those of you who aren’t familiar with the show. How I Met Your Mother is the ongoing story of five friends living in New York. They are likable, sincere Ted (Josh Radnor); his roommate, Marshall (Jason Segel) a goofy, but intelligent lawyer; Marshall’s bride, the bubbly Lily (former vampire slayer, Alyson Hannigan); their swinging bachelor friend, Barney (the scene-stealing Neil Patrick Harris); and Robin (Cobie Smulders), the girl who appeared to be the love of Ted’s life, but, as we learned in the very first episode, is not. How do we now this? Because Ted (from some yet-to-be-determined point in the future) is narrating each episode to his teenage children, detailing to them exactly how he met their mother. Future Ted is always off screen, which is convenient because future Ted, the narrator, is voiced by Bob Saget. (more…)