Why How I Met Your Father Isn’t Working
From 2005 to 2014, the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother delighted its audience in its whimsical and over-the-top depiction of life as a 20/30-something in the big apple. It was laugh-out-loud funny, heartfelt, and charming. And its framework of the main character of Ted Mosby in 2030 telling his pre-teen son and daughter all about how he met their mother was an incredibly compelling premise. Fast forward seven years, and Hulu has premiered the pilot episode for a reboot starring my childhood idol, Disney Channel star of Lizzie McGuire fame, Hilary Duff. In theory, this show should satisfy How I Met Your Mother fans and Lizzie McGuire fans alike, and be right up my alley. But in reality, this pilot was a tired, cheesy and tone-deaf mess.
Let’s get into what I did and didn’t like about it, my theory as to why it exists, and what I think would need to happen for this show to succeed.
Warning: This review contains spoilers for the pilot episode of How I Met Your Father
Pros and Cons
The Pros
Everyone get out your yellow legal pads, because we’re about to start off Ted Mosby style and make a pros and cons list. I’ll start with the things I liked about the pilot.
Modern Sensibilities: One of the things that immediately stood out to me was that they used the element of video calling to hide what Sophie’s son looks like. This I thought was a very smart take on the format of the show. In the original series, Ted’s kids are shown sitting across from him while he tells the story. And being that the two kids were caucasian and brunette, this caused viewers to focus in on women who matched those kids’ appearance in order to figure out who the mother could be. So blonde women Ted dated often got eliminated from the list of possible mothers, and any relationship he had with a non-white woman never lasted more than one episode. But by not showing Sophie’s son, we can see her date a more diverse selection of men who could potentially be the father. And the show has proven that unlike its 2005 counterpart, it’s willing to showcase a more diverse cast. However this show still manages to shoot itself in the foot at the end of the pilot in terms of diversity in Sophie’s lovelife, which I will get to in the Cons section.
Easter Eggs: I did appreciate a few of the Easter eggs from the original series that I noticed in this pilot from the Glenn McKenna ad at one of the bars to the character of Jesse taking over the apartment Ted, Marshall, and Lily used to share. They were cute nods to the original show. However I am hoping that this is not their attempt at making us feel the magic of the original series. I’ll go more in-depth on this concept later on. But it gave me flashbacks to the new Star Wars movies by Disney. And how it thought that adding plot elements and iconography from the original trilogy would be enough to remind you of the old movies and recreate the same feeling.
The Cons
2022 vs 2050 Sophie: Am I the only one who thought it was bizarre that they actually show what Sophie looks like in 2050? Sophie is already a grown woman nearing 30 in the pilot, so why would she change appearance so drastically 28 years later? Don’t get me wrong; I’d be thrilled to look like Kim Catrall at 58. But it makes no sense and becomes distracting. I realize that the original show begs the same question as well with Josh Radnor playing present day Ted Mosby and the late great Bob Saget performing the voiceover for future Ted, (this Family Guy clip pokes fun at the concept) but at least we didn’t see older Ted and could just assume his voice may have changed a bit with age. Adding Kim Catrall’s face to the framework of the show leaves nothing to the imagination, not to mention she will technically age while telling her son the story if this show goes on for more than a few years.
I also find it bizarre that they make Sophie’s personality in 2022 so drastically different from her personality in 2050. I’m starting to wonder if this story is actually about how Sophie’s personality goes from innocent clumsy ingenue to Samantha Jones as a Fairfield County wine mom.
The Characters: As we all know, pilots by design give a limited scope of what each character is like. They get such a small fragment of time to covney to us who they are within the plot and what to expect of their personality. But so far, these characters are not doing it for me. I have no major issues (*salutes* Major Issues) with Sophie, Jesse, Ian, or Sid. But everybody else drives me insane: Charlie is the antithesis of the term “comedic relief”. As for Ellen, I really don’t appreciate that she’s playing into the offensive Asian stereotype that we’re socially awkward people who everyone forgets and ignores. And unfortunately for this Valentina, I did not eat her up every time she was on that damn screen. I found her to be an unsubtle Gen-Z stereotype with her ear-splitting shrieking and bootleg Ariana Grande wardrobe.
The Father: While I am happy that the show didn’t narrow down the possibilities of who the father could be to a particular race or hair color like the original show did, it unfortunately does narrow the scope to four men from the pilot. Sophie explains that the father is one of the men she met the night of the pilot. Clips featuring Sid, Jesse, Ian and Charlie then play, implying the answer could only be one of them. In the original series, the plot is all about Ted’s journey to meeting the mother. The pilot of this series tells how Sophie meets her future husband, but the show itself is all about how they actually get together. There is an upside and a downside to this format. The upside is that we get to spend more time seeing Sophie’s chemistry evolve with her future husband as the show goes along, now that we know he’s already one of the existing characters. In fact, the original show was criticized for not giving the audience enough time with Ted and the mother together. The downside is that the premise of who the father is is not as romantic and mysterious.
There’s an episode of How I Met Your Mother that shows a map of New York City, with future Ted narrating that his love story was still out there waiting for him. And when I was single in San Francisco looking for the love of my life, watching that episode gave me hope that the right person was out there, and that we’d one day find each other. It’s a lot more romantic than the idea that the love of your life is one of four guys you already have the met, one of whom is newly engaged, one of whom is hooking up with a friend of yours, and one of whom lives on the opposite side of the globe. Those prospects sound depressing.
Laugh Track Comedy: It’s kind of amazing how many unfunny jokes this pilot could fit into its runtime. I don’t think a single joke made me smile or release air from my nostrils quickly, let alone laugh. And I believe that it all has to do with the show’s format. People just don’t watch sitcoms the way they used to. How I Met Your Mother along with Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory were part of this final era of television where laugh track sitcoms could be the hottest thing on television. In the 2000s, people were already to switch over to the comedy vérité single camera-style sitcoms like Arrested Development and The Office. This style of show was void of a laugh track, allowing the comedy to come from the characters subtly reacting to one another. And the style only became more popular in the 2010s. So to be going back to the laugh track style in 2022 feels antiquated and ill-suited. The characters are written awkwardly and the actors struggle to play them. This particular style of writing is just not as effective as it used to be.
Speaking of the show’s format, let’s now get into the root of why How I Met Your Mother and How I Met Your Father were created in the first place.
Intent isn’t Everything
HIMYM’s Original Purpose
It’s no coincidence that How I Met Your Mother was created right around the time that FRIENDS had wrapped up its final season. After a heavy hitter of a show ends, you have fans all over the world hoping to find something new to fill a void in their hearts - not to mention their Thursday evenings. So CBS created a series with similar characters and a similar premise: A group of friends living in New York City would meet up at their favorite watering hole to chat, and then go off on a fun adventure. All while casually living in apartments that would realistically cost an arm, a leg and other major organs. And each character would correlate with an existing FRIENDS character.
A lot of FRIENDS fans wrote the show off, claiming it was too similar and unoriginal to stand on its own. And I don’t blame them for feeling that way initially. How I Met Your Mother could never replace FRIENDS. I’m not even a fan of FRIENDS, and I can see that you just can’t recreate the magic that that show made people feel. It was being made in the 90s and acts as a time capsule of the innocence and lightheartedness of that decade. And that unique combination of cast, setting and writing can’t be duplicated to give everyone the same warm and fuzzy feeling.
But following the pilot, How I Met Your Mother began to showcase its unique voice and style of storytelling. Its characters began to develop further, and soon they were nothing like the characters from FRIENDS. Its brand of comedy, high-concept nature, hard-hitting dramatic scenes and fantasy-like elements set it apart from its predecessor and gave it legs to stand on with its own audience.
HIMYF’s Original Purpose
It’s obvious that this show is meant to be another take on the How I Met Your Mother concept, within the same universe, with the genders switched. In fact, there was a failed pilot created for this exact concept in 2014 with the series How I Met Your Dad starring Greta Gerwig. But I believe the intention behind How I Met Your Father goes way beyond that.
A couple of years back, there was talk of Disney creating a Lizzie McGuire reboot that shows Lizzie taking on the world as a 30-something. There were even exciting photos released Duff with her former co-stars of the classic Disney Channel show. But in February of 2020, she confirmed via Instagram that the reboot was shelved, as she and the creators of the reboot didn’t want to make a depiction of Lizzie’s life as an adult that had a Disneyfied PG lens on it. She even expressed that she’d love if Disney would let them move the show to Hulu so that they could create the show they had in mind with fewer restraints, but as we all know, the mouse never budges.
So at the end of the day, this show is trying to fill the void of both How I Met Your Mother and the Lizzie McGuire reboot that never was. The funny thing is, I’m both supposed demographics of potential viewers: A huge How I Met Your Mother fan, and a millennial who grew up watching Lizzie McGuire on TV. But that doesn’t automatically make me enjoy this show. That’s not how any of this works.
Can HIMYF Be Saved?
Let’s be honest: The How I Met Your Mother pilot was heads above its Father counterpart in originality, humor and charm. But when you think back to the premiere of that first episode of How I Met Your Mother and the backlash it received from FRIENDS viewers who saw many obvious parallels, you have to admit that first impressions aren’t everything. Once How I Met Your Mother stopped trying to be so much like FRIENDS and discovered its own audience and style of storytelling, it stopped being compared to its predecessor and enjoyed its own brand of success.
The question is, how did it manage to go from perceived rip-off to something legendary? That all comes from the show’s origin story. Show creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas met while attending Wesleyan, the university Ted, Marshall and Lily attend in their flashback episodes. Bays was perpetually single while Thomas was in a long-term relationship with his future wife Rebecca Alson-Milkman. The juxtaposition of the directions their love lives were taking sparked the idea for the show. The need for a FRIENDS replacement may have set the show in New York City and created a will-they won’t-they dynamic within the friend group, but the idea and heart behind the show was completely separate from that. Which is why the characters feel so real and so different from the characters in FRIENDS once you get to know them.
Just as a FRIENDS fan can’t be forced to love How I Met Your Mother just because it’s about a group of friends in NYC, I can’t be forced to love How I Met Your Father just because it has a framework I’m familiar with and stars one of my childhood idols. Ted Mosby and Lizzie McGuire aren’t actually here. How I Met Your Father can steal the original show’s themesong, apartment set and maybe even a keg or two of Wharmpess beers all they want, but those elements aren’t what made the show special. And gender-swapping the main character, giving everyone an iPhone 12 and using the word FOMO is not enough to make this show a standalone. In order to carve out an audience for itself, this show will have to tap into the unique challenges of dating in this generation, and develop a new character people can really grow to love. Based on this pilot, I don’t have a lot of confidence that its network will have the foresight to make those changes in time, but I’ll stay hopeful for those who are enjoying it.
Until we meet again!
