A remarkable event occurred on Monday, February 19th, 2007. In fact, the evening may go down in television history. That was the night that How I Met Your Mother, on CBS at 8 pm, and the new sitcom Rules of Engagement, also on CBS, but at 9:30 PM, aired episodes that told the exact same story.

Now it is true that in the long history of television, many plot points tend to get repeated. After all, there are only so many stories, and a lot of hours to fill on way too many stations. In consequence, longterm TV viewers will see the repetitious use of certain season padding tropes. In dramas, there’s the “temporary blindness” trope (used in shows from The Untouchables to Dynasty), there’s the “loss of memory” trope (Miami Vice, among many others), the “false arrest” trope (soap operas since the dawn of time), and so forth. But, for two different shows to have the same plot premise on the same network on the same night, well, that’s historic.

In the How I Met Your Mother episode called “Stuff” a fight breaks out between the show’s young Manhattanite lovers, architect Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) and TV newswoman Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), over the amount of clutter in his apartment, junk that in fact had been given to him by numerous ex-girlfriends. She finds this disheartening and distracting and demands that he remove it all.

In the episode of Rules of Engagement, called “Young and the Restless,” a fight that breaks out between the show’s young lovers, Adam (Oliver Hudson) and Jennifer (Bianca Kajlich), professions unknown. Adam revealed in passing that the nice big bed he took out of storage to accommodate their sleeping needs is the same one he used while dating a predecessor, Sonya. This outrages Jennifer, her philosophy being, “I cannot sleep or do other things in a bed you bought with your ex.” She finds the presence of the old bed disheartening and distracting and demands that he remove it.

To have not only the same network air what amounts to the same story in two different sitcoms, but even worse, and against the odds, on the very same night is tantamount to, oh, say Universal and Fox releasing big budget volcano movies in the exact same year. Actually that did happened – both Volcano and Dante’s Peak came out in 1997, so maybe the proper stance to take is wonderment that such coincidences don’t happen more often, especially in that plot-hungry abattoir that is the network sitcom’s Writer’s Room.

In fact fans of both Mother and Rules should be grateful. CBS offered its viewers a perfect, almost laboratory level opportunity to compare and contrast the two sitcoms, to weigh and assess their virtues and faults in relation to each other.

How I Met Your Mother, now in its second season, is a congenial comedy about two couples and the fifth wheel single guy whose presence puts their intimacy in sharp relief. Rules of Engagement is (or was) a acerbic comedy about two couples and the fifth wheel single guy whose presence puts their intimacy in sharp relief. Hmmm, well, perhaps the differences are found deeper.

For one thing, Mother‘s cast is warmer. The two couples, Ted and Robin, plus kindergarten teacher Lily (Alyson Hannigan, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and lawyer Marshall (Jason Segel, a veteran of the cult favorite Freaks and Geeks), are warm and engaging people who actually like each other, unusual in a sitcom context where the modus operandi is generally insult humor, unattached to character motivation or plot logic. Neil Patrick Harris plays Barney Stinson, the power suited womanizer, but one can’t even take him seriously as a relationship threatening roué, because he, too, is ultimately soft and nice. The gimmick of Mother is that the events we are watching, set in the present, are the anecdotes told by Ted to his children about “how I met your mother,” with the older Ted voiced by Bob Saget. This allowed the writers to play a curious game: withholding information about just who it is Ted ends up marrying (though at least viewers know from the narration that it’s not Lily). This pitch-meeting level gimmick proved not to be essential to the show, however, and has been progressively minimized. Without it, How I Met Your Mother remains surprisingly funny and the characters are attractive and well-cast, helping the series earns viewer loyalty.

Rules of Engagement, by contrast, is a mid-season replacement that made its debut on February 5th, and is currently on hiatus after seven episodes (a common network practice employed as far back as Seinfeld, which went on to become a hit). Engagement‘s gimmick is to look at relationships from three different but simultaneously stages of love. David Spade’s Russell represents hedonistic singledom. Young love is represented by David and Jennifer. Long-term married life is embodied by Megyn Price’s Audrey and Patrick Warburton’s Jeff. With its single Casanova and its young and old couples in grumpy contrast, the show is a cross between the concurrent Mother and the Fox sitcom ‘Til Death, itself a variation on the earlier Fox show, Married … With Children. The problem with Rules, as highlighted by the two similar episodes, is that its characters aren’t very likable, being either skuzzy (Russell) or dumb (the young couple). Worse, it traffics in that same old and tired insult humor that has afflicted the worst sitcoms since the 1970s. The sole attraction Rules holds is in Warburton and Price, who immediately seemed convincingly cozy together. Warburton’s line readings are unpredictable, and Price, a veteran of earlier sitcoms, is endearing as a wised up “older” wife.

As the two shows played out their similar plots, it was clear that for Mother the premise of old-girlfriend-artifacts was a single step in a larger story, perhaps prepared long ahead by the writers, because at the end of the episode the pair decide to move in together (though there are subsequent episodic complications). For Rules the fight over first the bed and then some other romantic artifacts is just an excuse for an insult fest that results in the inevitable fake resolution hollow hug, the last refuge of the lesser sitcom. The couple has “learned” something, but only until their next contrived fight in a future episode.

So though it was a potentially embarrassing coincidence, the airing of same story sitcom episodes proved helpful. In fact, more shows should air the exact same stories. There should be a rule that at least once a season all sitcoms should build a story around the exact same premise, which viewers can use as aesthetic measuring sticks, the way film buffs compare different versions of Ben-Hur and Exorcist: The Beginning.

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