Whether or not you’re a fan of the idea of How I Met Your Mother being spun off, it seems CBS is optimistic about the project as they’re moving forward with it. It’s currently titled How I Met Your Dad, and the latest update is that CBS has given the comedy a pilot-production commitment.
Following the news that How I Met Your Mother creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas were teaming with Up All Night’s Emily Spivey for a potential HIMYM offshoot that’s not really a spinoff, comes word that CBS has given the project a pilot-production commitment, and a title that’s just closer enough to its predecessor to be really recognizable, but just modified enough to be awkward. (Why How I Met Your Dad instead of How I Met Your Father?)
THR says the plan for the pilot is to set it up as a stand-alone, as opposed to doing a back-door planted pilot, which would air at some point during the current, final season of How I Met Your Mother. Examples of the latter approach include The Originals (introduced during The Vampire Diaries episode), The Finder (introduced as an episode of Bones) and Private Practice (introduced during Grey’s Anatomy). But in the case of those examples, the characters starring in the spinoff were all connected somehow to the origin series. It doesn’t sound like that’ll be the case with How I Met Your Dad, as THR says the story will be told from a female point of view, and will be a brand-new story with new characters and a new voice at its center. The site says it “may not” bleed into HIMYM.
We can certainly argue that this plan to spin off the series — with a show that doesn’t sound like much of a spinoff beyond its efforts to reboot the concept with a new story — is an effort to squeeze some extra juice out of the popularity of the original series without actually having to start from scratch with a new show. And maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s unoriginal. But with Bays, Thomas and Spivey working together, I’d still like to see what they come up with. The benefit to calling this a spinoff is that they can rip off the original concept as much as they want when telling this new story. But on the downside, the standard is going to be set high, and it’s going to take some great casting to bring together a group as great as the original.
I’ve seen some suggestions that the spinoff should be Ted’s wife side of the story, which is actually a great idea as I think we’d all love to see that, but one major issue to take into consideration there is the timeline. How I Met Your Mother debuted in 2005. Even if Ted’s wife’s side of the story didn’t go back that far, in order for the series to be accurate, the show would have to be set in the not-so-distant past. That could be kind of limiting for the show, considering part of the humor of the series is acknowledging certain events and pop culture references in our present, as Ted tells his kids what things were like at certain points of the story. If the spinoff took a similar approach with its humor, it would make HIMYD almost a period piece, but not quite, and that might get old after a season or two. But a limited series could work. Alas, it sounds like they’re looking to start fresh with this one, and it’s moving to pilot.
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