robin sparkles

I usually don't highlight repeats, but this is a special case:

Tonight, CBS will rerun what I thought was the funniest half-hour of TV in 2006: the "Slap Bet" episode of How I Met Your Mother. I'm not the only one who thought the episode was a high point of the 2006-07 television season, though: The Boston Globe thought it was the 2nd best episode of any show that aired in 2006. And Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger felt at the time that HIMYM made what he called "The Leap" after that episode, meaning that the ep had propelled the show to a higher quality level (though, like me, he later realized that it was more of a "high-water mark." And, also like me, he fell into the trap of comparing subsequent episodes to it).

What made the episode so great?

One of the advantages to being 31-year-old show-runners is that you can utilize your intimate relationship with the internet to effectively promote your show. That's what Carter Bays and Craig Thomas have been doing with How I Met Your Mother. First, it was Barney's Blog. Then it was the MySpace page for Robin Sparkles, complete with music video. Now, according to The New York Times, Bays and Thomas will be using MySpace again tonight, showing viewers scenes of Marshall's bachelor party that are too "racy" to be shown on TV. The deleted scene will be shown on the program's own MySpace page.

Bays and Thomas are using the internet because, as Thomas put it, "We're more like an NBC Thursday night comedy... but we happen to be on CBS. So how do we let young people know about our show if they're not watching the other shows on the network?"

(S02E09) Holy living crap, was that a funny episode or what? I laughed hard during most of it, something that I only seem to do during The Office, Scrubs, and early Simpsons episodes. God, it was all so good: The slap bet, and the resulting payments on both sides; Marshall and Lilly enthusiastically telling each other about every mundane detail of their days; Barney's "Ohh..." moments; Robin's elaborate (and classy!) lies about her nonexistent Canadian marriage; the flashback to thirty seconds before the first slap...

... But the best part of the entire episode came at the end, when Robin revealed her dirty little secret, one that she didn't want anyone to know, including her beloved boyfriend Ted...