Post 24 - How I Didn't Meet Your Baby. Or Your Gay Co-star.

As any viewer of CBS's How I Met Your Mother can tell you, the show has been going through great pains lately to hide the pregnancies of its two leading ladies. This practice has lead to a bit of a disagreement in the blogosphere, particularly in this past week's episode where Cobie Smulders (aka Robin Scherbatsky aka Robin Sparkles) was seen drinking while her stomach was hidden behind various objects. According to one anonymous poster:

How is it distracting that she is pregnant in real life, but drinking on the show? Those two things don't have anything to do with each other. She's not pregnant on the show! She's not drinking in real life! I think it's silly that we care about hiding bellies anyway. She's an actor- she's playing the part of someone who's not pregnant. Just like [Neil Patrick Harris] is playing a womanizer when he clearly is not in real life. We don't hide him behind lampshades so that we don't see how gay he really is.

While we understand this person's point, having a visibly pregnant woman drinking, hooking up, and generally going about her business while no mention of her obviously expanding stomach is ever made would actually be INCREDIBLY distracting and just bad tv. As for Neil Patrick Harris's ability to play straight, does anyone really think hiding a person behind decorative household furnishings is really the best way to make them seem less gay?? Frankly, the whole idea of trying to analogize an actress's pregnancy to an actor's homosexuality just doesn't make a lot of sense.

As another commentator named LoopyChew tried to explain:

One's a physical condition, one's something that's not immediately physically apparent.

Well said. But in this case we're gonna have to disagree. Not immediately physically apparent? Really, LoopyChew? REALLY?