Who is Ted Mosby in How I Met Your Mother?

Show

How I Met Your Mother

Played by

Josh Radnor

First episode

“Pilot”Season 1, Episode 1, aired September 19, 2005

Role

Lead

Network

CBS

Occupation

Architect and architecture professor

Show run

2005 to 2014

Also known as

Theodore Mosby, Theodore Evelyn Mosby, Professor Mosby, Future Ted

Ted Mosby is an idealistic architect from Ohio who wants nothing more than to find "the one" and settle down. Played by Josh Radnor, with Bob Saget voicing his older self as narrator, Ted is the hero, the storyteller, and sometimes the punchline of How I Met Your Mother.

On How I Met Your Mother, Ted Mosby's story runs through Tracy McConnell (Wife), Robin Scherbatsky (Ex-girlfriend), Marshall Eriksen (Best Friend), Lily Aldrin (Best Friend), Barney Stinson (Wingman), and Ranjit (Driver).

Who is Ted Mosby?

Ted is an architect living in Manhattan with his college roommate Marshall and Marshall's longtime girlfriend Lily. He grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, studied at Wesleyan University, and arrived in New York with big dreams of designing a building for the city skyline. When Marshall proposes to Lily in the pilot, Ted decides he is ready to find his own soulmate, and that decision launches the whole series.

The show is framed as a story told in 2030, when an older Ted sits his son and daughter down to explain how he met their mother. That framing lets the show jump around in time, tease future events, and treat Ted's many romantic detours as chapters in one long road to the right person.

Personality and comedy

Ted is a sincere, sentimental man who believes in grand gestures, and that is both his charm and his problem. On his first date with Robin he steals a blue French horn from a restaurant wall and then tells her he loves her, which scares her off on the spot. He corrects people's grammar, gets pretentious about architecture and literature, and every Halloween puts on the same costume in hopes of finding a woman he met at a party years earlier.

His friends love to tease him for it, especially Barney, who sees Ted as a project in need of a wingman. Much of the comedy comes from the gap between the polished way Future Ted tells the story and the clumsy, occasionally self-serving way young Ted actually behaved. The show is not shy about letting Ted be wrong.

Key storylines

Ted's longest and most complicated relationship is with Robin. He wins her over at the end of season one, they date through season two, and they break up when they realize they want different things. They stay close friends and later roommates, but Ted never fully lets go, which shapes the rest of the series. Along the way he dates the baker Victoria, gets engaged to the dermatologist Stella, and is left at the altar when Stella reunites with her ex.

His career has its own ups and downs. Ted is hired to design a new headquarters for Goliath National Bank and then fired from the project, tries to run his own firm, Mosbius Designs, and finally takes a job teaching architecture at Columbia University at the end of season four, which turns out to be an important step toward meeting the Mother. In the final season, Ted is the best man at Barney and Robin's wedding and plans to move to Chicago right after, until he meets Tracy McConnell at the Farhampton train station.

The ending and legacy

The series finale, "Last Forever," reveals that Ted and Tracy date, get engaged, have two children, and finally marry, but that Tracy dies in 2024. In the last scene, Ted's kids encourage him to ask out Robin, and he shows up beneath her window holding the same blue French horn from their first date. The ending divided fans, and a DVD alternate ending was later released in which Tracy is alive.

Whatever viewers think of Ted's choices, the whole show is built around his voice. His habit of telling stories out of order, skipping ahead years and doubling back, is what made How I Met Your Mother feel different from other hangout sitcoms, and the later spinoff How I Met Your Father kept the same idea of a parent narrating from the future.

Ted Mosby: frequently asked questions

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