GOD IS IN THE DETAILS: I should have posted this 12 or 16 hours ago, but let me pose a question: About what do you care less: Robin's bland, generic ex-boyfriend Don, or Ted's career as a (lousy*) architect?
*Why can't the show just spend a couple grand to have an actual architect draw up an imaginary building, or even just buy the right to use some conceptual drawing from some architecture grad student? It's one thing to show Lily's crappy paintings (while acknowledging that they're crappy). It's quite another to make Ted's love of and genius at architecture the A-plot of several episodes while trotting out a dumbed-down version of a tacky 1982 tax writeoff disguising as an Omaha office tower as Ted's signature building, or to show the nonsense that Ted spews when he teaches his class or holds forth with his friends about his supposed passion. I don't mind when shows are offhandedly unrealistic about their characters' jobs (which 60 hours of the week is Marshall working?), but when they're making the jobs an important part of the plot, they need to follow the West Wing Directive and to avoid the Studio 60 Disproof: If you're going to tell us how brilliant a character is at something, you either need to nail it onscreen or keep it offscreen in its entirety.
