Miscast: Cobie Smulders

Every time I watch How I Met Your Mother I cringe and shake my head when Cobie Smulders, who plays Robin, appears on screen. Smulders is the weakest of the ensemble, and horribly miscast. Her mere presence causes every scene to collapse under the weight of her unfunny blandness. She’s not a bad actress; she just belongs in one that doesn’t require a sense of humor. Her delivery is painfully flat, void of comic timing. With her perfectly symmetrical good-looks and cold blue eyes, she would be perfect on a one-hour primetime drama like Criminal Minds or The Mentalist. In Mother, Robin is intended to be the Rachel Green of the group, but Smulders simply isn’t as clever or creative as Jennifer Aniston, who delivered laughs with practically every line she uttered. There was a rumor that Smulders was being considered for the Wonder Woman film; perhaps there’s hope she might one day leave How I Met Your Mother for a career in movies.

Biting Reality

In quarterlife, the uncannily perceptive twentysomething Web series on MySpaceTV (soon to debut on NBC), Dylan Krieger (played by the winsome Bitsie Tulloch) is a 25-year-old writer who’s so lost in the bitter ironies of life that she’s unable to see that the one thing that’s holding her back is herself. And that’s pretty much the story of her friends’ lives as well; living a frustrating reality so different from the life they desire that they can do nothing but surrender to it. The creators of the show, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitiz, who, over a decade ago gave us the cult teen-angst drama My So-Called Life, as well as sweeping epic films such as Glory and Legends of the Fall, present to us a world in which all of our fears, hopes and dreams are reflected right back at us. This isn’t One Tree Hill or Gossip Girl. Zwick and Herskovitz take a tired TV genre and inject it with heartfelt realism and startling humanity.