“How I Met Your Mother” star Josh Radnor admitted that the title of their sitcom was a “fake-out.” The 39-year-old actor defended the much-maligned finale of the series, saying they can’t please everybody, but admitted that the title was misleading.

On Monday, many fans were outraged when the ending of the show that they’ve watched for nine seasons was a disappointment. The title of the show is, of course, about how Ted Mosby (Radnor) met the mother of his two children, but it turned out that was just a ruse because all his stories about their mother were about how he was still in love with their “Aunt Robin” (Colbie Smulders) all those times.

And Radnor agreed.

“I thought the title of the show was always a bit of a fake-out,” he told Vulture in an interview, quipping that he hadn’t had time to prep a defence for the show.

“It was more of a hook to hang the thing on. Really it was more about these are the crazy adventures and these are the lessons I had to learn before I met your mother.

“But, also, part of the DNA of the show is they lead you one way and then they pull you back. You think you’re watching one thing in an episode and then it turns out you’re watching something completely different. I think that they twists in the finale were in keeping with that.”

As for the controversial ending in which Robin and Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) divorced after three years after the show spent a whole season preparing for their wedding, and Robin and Ted ending up together, Radnor only said that they just couldn’t please everybody.

“There are so many opinions floating around. There have always been people that thought that Barney and Robin were perfect together, there have always been people that thought it didn’t make sense. There are people that wanted Ted and Robin to be together. There are people that thought they didn’t work together. So I just feel that part of the divisiveness and part of the anger and also part of the enthusiasm all speaks to something really great.”

Meanwhile, fans who are angry at the show’s ending are pretending that the last two minutes of the finale episode didn’t happen. An alternate ending made by a fan was uploaded on YouTube, gathering over 400,000 views in just a couple of days.

Uploaded Ricardo J Dylan explained (all sic), “I loved the finale until the final two minutes. Carter Bays & Craig Thomas Creators and writers of the show in the last 2 minutes took the freedom to destroy years of character development and history, they ruined the story they were trying to tell and in the end nobody is happy with the final result (except for a few people),

“i recall the interviews and the yearbook of the first season where they stated very clear that robin was never the story that they intended to tell but that the people fell in love with he character, so then they spent 9 years building up to this amazing story and all o the sudden in the end they go back on their word and decide to screw the whole thing up, i seriously don’t know what happened and i would love for them to come out and explain wtf were thinking or it they were ‘eating’ a sandwich when they wrote this final episode.”

As commenters online said, they weren’t outraged that the Mother (Cristin Milioti), who has been named in the final episode as Tracy, was dead in the year 2030. Although it’s not the ideal ending that they wanted, they have accepted the persistent theory of the dead mother since it would justify why Ted was telling their story to their children.

However, what they were furious that Ted and Robin ended up together.

“This was the most important story about a loved one who has passed on that Ted is telling his kids. It is literally the reason why they were born. In the end, it shouldn’t turn into a story about how Ted still wants to be with the first woman he had a crush on after his best friends got engaged,” YouTube user Quinn Chun wrote.

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