How I Met Your Mother is often compared to Friends. They’re both multi-camera sitcoms with a laughter track. They’re both set in New York City. They’re both about a group of friends that includes two college roommates, a married couple, an on/off couple, and a chauvinistic womanizer.

RELATED: 10 Things Seinfeld Did Better Than Friends

Along with those similarities come a lot of different ways the two shows can be compared. It’s not a black-and-white case of one show being clearly better than the other. Both shows have their own strengths and weaknesses. So, here are 5 Things Friends Did Better Than How I Met Your Mother (And 5 HIMYM Did Better).

Updated February 25th, 2020: The popularity of Friends and How I Met Your Mother continues to soar in the streaming age. Fans of these two shows continue to regularly re-binge all ten seasons of the former and all nine seasons of the latter. It was recently announced that the cast of Friends would be reuniting for an unscripted special on HBO Max. As the debate over which New York-based ensemble sitcom is truly better rages on, we’ve updated this list with a few more entries.

HIMYM Did Better: Premise

Kids on How I Met Your Mother

Friends didn’t really have a premise. It was just a show about people hanging out in New York. How I Met Your Mother was also about people hanging out in New York, but it had a premise: an older Ted recounts to his kids the longest possible telling of the story of how he met their mom.

At times, this bordered on the far-fetched, as the story took nine years to tell, but it gave the show a direction. Friends was more aimless, because it wasn’t leading towards anything in particular.

Friends Did Better: Dialogue

Friends Joey interview Central Perk

Sitcoms are like joke machines. The trick with sitcom dialogue is to seamlessly move from joke to joke without losing sight of the fact that you’re writing a conversation. Due to How I Met Your Mother’s penchant for cutaway gags, the show’s dialogue often felt disjointed.

The writers of Friends, on the other hand, did a fantastic job of jumping from beat to beat in their dialogue. There were plenty of jokes laced into each scene, but the dialogue always felt like a more-or-less naturalistic conversation between friends.

HIMYM Did Better: College Flashbacks

Lily and Marshall in college in HIMYM

Both Friends and How I Met Your Mother included flashbacks to the characters’ college days. In both cases, the fashion stylings of the younger characters were hilarious – from Ross’ mustache to Ted’s curly afro to Chandler’s Flock of Seagulls haircut – but on the whole, HIMYM’s flashbacks worked better.

Rather than focusing entire episodes on the characters’ college days, HIMYM would only occasionally flash back to Ted, Marshall, and Lily’s days at Wesleyan. With gags about Ted’s toxic relationship with Karen, his radio career under the pseudonym “Doctor X,” and “eating sandwiches,” HIMYM’s college flashbacks felt like a show of their own.

Friends Did Better: The Womanizer

Joey sitting in a chair in Friends, talking.

Joey Tribbiani and Barney Stinson are the “womanizer” characters of their respective shows. Joey was hardly a perfect role model – he once seductively said, “How you doin’?” to baby Emma in a video that was going to be shown to her on her 18th birthday (when he would be in his fifties) – but he was nowhere near as depraved and disrespectful as Barney. Barney’s treatment of women was downright creepy.

HIMYM Did Better: Plot Twists

Ted Stella HIMYM - Worst TV Weddings

Both Friends and How I Met Your Mother took sharp left turns in their ongoing narratives that stunned fans. Examples from Friends include Monica and Chandler sleeping together, Ross saying, “...take thee Rachel,” and David’s move to Minsk.

Examples from HIMYM include Marshall’s dad’s death (foreshadowed by an episode-long countdown), Stella leaving Ted at the altar, and Lily temporarily breaking off her engagement to Marshall. These twists were both more unexpected and more hard-hitting than Friends’ twists.

Friends did better: The on/off romance

Friends Season 9

Both Friends and HIMYM have an on/off romance between two of its lead characters. Friends has Ross and Rachel, while HIMYM has Ted and Robin. Arguably, the TV viewing public was way more invested in Ross and Rachel than they were in Ted and Robin. Every Ross and Rachel development was a shocker: the Xerox girl, “Take thee Rachel,” the pregnancy.

Fans were hooked by their relationship right up to the end of the series. Meanwhile, Ted and Robin just kept breaking up and then kissing and getting back together and then breaking up again. It got to the point where fans would just roll their eyes.

HIMYM did better: Narrative structure

With its nonlinear narrative structures, jumping all over the place, and dovetailing story threads, HIMYM was always far better at telling stories than Friends. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that Friends was written for a live audience and filmed in front of a live audience, so it couldn’t really jump around and cut in and out of scenes in the way HIMYM does.

RELATED: How I Met Your Mother: The 5 Best (And 5 Worst) Episodes

HIMYM was filmed without a live audience and then edited together and shown to audiences whose laughter was then recorded and played over the episodes. So, HIMYM was allowed more freedom. Still, this is undeniably one way it’s better.

Friends did better: Series finale

Friends Season 10

The series finale of How I Met Your Mother is infamously terrible, as the (SPOILER ALERT!) death of the titular mother is brushed over in a single line of voiceover narration after we’ve just spent the entire ninth season of the show getting to know her. Robin and Barney’s divorce is brushed over in a single scene as well, after we’ve just spent the entire ninth season waiting for their wedding.

Friends’ finale, on the other hand, is one of the best ever made. It might be a tad schmaltzy for some, but we get closure on all the characters’ journeys and we leave them in a happy place. That’s all fans ask for in a finale.

HIMYM did better: Character development

How I Met Your Mother Bob Barker

Sometimes in sitcoms, the characters don’t evolve between the first episode and the last episode. They stay exactly the same and never learn from their mistakes, because that’s the joke. But that only applies to sitcoms entirely bereft of drama with characters who are terrible people, like Seinfeld.

The problem with Friends is that it’s a show with drama and it wants you to think its characters are great people, but none of them change or mature throughout ten seasons. Joey’s the same lovable idiot, Phoebe’s the same hippie skeptic, and Rachel’s the same ditzy airhead (even though she did manage to land her dream job). Chandler got married and had kids, but he’s still Chandler. Even Ross, who is arguably a sociopath, does nothing to mature by the series finale. But in HIMYM, the characters do change. They’re constantly reassessing what they want in their lives and trying to be better people. Even Barney matures by the end when he has a baby.

Friends did better: Long-running storylines

Friends Season 4

Okay, the whole of How I Met Your Mother is technically a long-running storyline, beginning with older Ted telling his kids he’s going to tell them the story of how he met their mother and ending with (SPOILER ALERT!) her demise. But what Friends did better were multi-episode story arcs that spanned maybe ten or twenty episodes. How I Met Your Mother had a lot of those that didn’t land.

Fans who rewatch the series find themselves groaning at certain points in the show’s timeline – 'oh, great, it’s the Stella storyline' etc. There are only a few of those in Friends (the Emily storyline being one of them). Most of them – Phoebe’s pregnancy, Ross dating one of his students, the trip to Barbados etc. – work really well.

HIMYM did better: Supporting characters

How I Met Your Mother - Bryan Cranston smiling and holding a phone

The main six characters of Friends are among the most lovable in the history of television, but unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the supporting characters that populate the world around them. Gunther, Janice, Mr. Heckles, Estelle, Tag – Friends fans can pretend these characters are all hilarious, but really, they’re just annoying.

HIMYM, on the other hand, had an eclectic cast of supporting characters that could rival that of Seinfeld: Ranjit, Carl, Wendy the waitress, Bilson, Scooter, Patrice, the Captain. The list goes on. And Marshall’s parents were great and Lily’s dad played by Chris Elliott was a funny character.

Friends did better: Originality

Friends Season 6

One of the main things to consider in a debate of Friends v. HIMYM is that HIMYM ripped off Friends. Friends came out of the gate in the ‘90s as a fiercely original series about a bunch of twentysomethings in New York. While the premise was similar to Seinfeld, the characters and their relationships were all original.

HIMYM, meanwhile, did shamelessly steal a lot from Friends. It was like a Family Guy/Simpsons thing. The originality is a huge point in The Simpsons’ favor, and the same goes for Friends. Obviously, Friends gets points for being the one that’s not a rip-off.

HIMYM did better: Dramatic moments

Both Friends and HIMYM had dramatic moments to undercut their comedy, but HIMYM’s were much more effective. Remember the episode with a whole visual countdown leading up to Marshall finding out his dad had died? No one can watch that without crying, no matter how many times they’ve seen it before.

RELATED: How I Met Your Mother: 10 Saddest Moments, Ranked

But a lot of the dramatic moments in Friends fall flat, either coming off as awkward or cheesy. HIMYM can really hit you in the feels when it wants to, like Lily finding out she was pregnant at the end of the worst day of Marshall’s life. The Barney’s father storyline with John Lithgow wasn’t that good, granted, but other than that, HIMYM’s drama is stronger.

Friends did better: Ensemble cast

Friends

Friends was always praised by critics for being the first true ensemble show, with no one character getting precedence over the others. Even when Jennifer Aniston became an A-list movie star, Rachel didn’t get any more screen time or storylines than characters played by actors who weren’t made as famous by the show, like Joey or Phoebe.

HIMYM, meanwhile, does definitely prefer certain characters over others. Ted is the lead, but the show doesn’t work as well as Friends that way. And there were stretches where characters would be absent entirely, like when Lily disappeared to San Francisco for a few episodes.

HIMYM did better: Unpredictability

Ted and Robin sitting on a beach in HIMYM

Each week when a new episode of Friends aired, you pretty much knew what you were getting. Sometimes you’d be surprised by one of the characters proposing to their future spouse or Ross and Rachel getting back together for the umpteenth time, but that applies to maybe ten of the more than 200 episodes of the show.

Every episode more or less followed the same rigid format of an A-plot mixed in with a B-plot. But HIMYM was much more flexible in its format. One episode would have a sci-fi twist as Ted talks to future versions of himself and Barney. One would have Robin doing the narration, talking to the imaginary kids she just found out she’ll never be able to have. It was much less predictable than Friends.

NEXT: 10 Shows To Watch If You Like Friends