Character
Robin Scherbatsky
Robin Scherbatsky in How I Met Your Mother (2005), played by Cobie Smulders.
Robin arrives in New York as a Canadian news reporter, sharp and independent, immediately catching Ted's eye at the bar where the gang gathers. She's allergic to sentimentality, keeps a former teen-pop-star secret buried, and bristles at the idea of settling down the way her friends assume she should want to.
Smulders plays against the sitcom grain, giving Robin a dry deadpan and genuine discomfort with domestic clichés instead of softening her into a standard love interest. The show lets her want different things than the people around her without treating that as a flaw to be fixed, which makes her funnier and more honest than the premise strictly requires.