Killing off Will Gardner made sense for

Killing off Will Gardner made sense for "The Good Wife," not just because Charles was eager to move on from the show, but because the place he occupied in the life of the show's central character, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), threatened to grow tiresome. Most of all, it made sense because it was senseless. There is maybe no better showcase of character than how we cope with the things we can never control.

The show must (and will) go on, and we'll get to see the remaining characters of "The Good Wife" in a new light.

It's not the same for "How I Met Your Mother," which, like its often-abbreviated title, went on longer than it should have.

Maybe we worry more than we should about endings, as if the enjoyment of years could be canceled out by a single episode.

It can't. Or at least it shouldn't.

But while the writers, not the viewers, own their characters, any long-running show requires a commitment from both sides. Living on in syndication, as "HIMYM" will, it asks us to forget:

* That Barney and Robin, too, once seemed to belong together.

* That "the mother" was a person, not just a placeholder.

* That the kids, who would have been fairly young when their mother died, probably wouldn't have been tired of hearing about her (or so eager to push their father toward "Aunt Robin").

* That a show that began by trying to break out of a tired format ended with one of TV's oldest cliches: the conveniently dead sitcom mom.