IGN: You're obviously pretty busy with the finale of this show, but where are you with the spinoff?
Craig Thomas: That's what's great, that we're writing it with somebody else too, a really talented writer, Emily Spivey -- I was thinking about Emily's credits the other day, and I was like, "She has much cooler credits than Carter and Craig." [Laughs]
Carter Bays: Oh my God, yeah.
Thomas: She had, like, 10 years on SNL, Portlandia, Parks and Rec, Up All Night. So she's such a good writer. We all broke the story and figured out the story together, and we're all writing it together. Right now it's in her court, and she's turning it in to us.
Question: How did you get hooked up together?
Thomas: Well, she had a deal at Twentieth. Carter and I were huge fans, and we basically said -- in success, Carter and I -- I don't think this is a secret, but we don't want to run another eight years of a similar show. We want to do something new and different! We think there's a wonderful female take on the How I Met format. We're not women.
Bays: Spoiler!
Thomas: Spoiler! We've already told a lot of our stories of our 20s and 30s. We said, "If we can find an amazingly strong, funny, female voice to collaborate with, then would run it -- we'd work on it and be producers and consult on it -- then we'll do it, but we won't do it if we don't find that person." Then the search took about one minute, because Emily happened to be represented by our same agent at UTA and has a deal with the studio, so the search was easy. She's been wonderful.
[Editor’s Note: Bays was approached by some other journalists at this point, which is why only Thomas is answering for the rest of this interview.]
IGN: The expectation when you hear "How I Met Your Dad" is that, format-wise, it will have two or three kids, listening to their mom’s story.
Thomas: What about eight kids? That's how we make it different!
IGN: [Laughs] But should people expect that, format-wise, paradigm-wise, it to be the same? Or might there be a curveball?
Thomas: There will be a lot of curveballs. I really feel like this new show has to prove how it's its own thing and how it's different. Yeah, we're consciously trying to make it feel like it's its own thing. I don't want to give too much away, because there are some twists and turns to how we do that. But it feels so archetypal, that concept -- a parent telling their kids who they were before the kids knew them. We're all so curious about that. Then, when you're a parent, you also want to tell your kid who you used to be. "I was someone totally different before you."
Question: "I was cool, I swear!"
Thomas: Yeah. If you do the show from a female perspective, it raises so many new, interesting questions and possibilities. The character in How I Met Your Dad, the main character Sally, is very different from Ted Mosby. We meet her at a very different and tumultuous moment of her life. Right away, it feels different and interesting to us as writers. At the same time, I hope it taps into something archetypal, which is just like, everyone wants to tell their life story, right? Whether it's to a friend or to their kids, you want to be able to say, "This is what happened! This the way it was 20 years ago, and this is how I got where I'm going in life." All we're really doing is trying to make sense of our lives and convey that to other people in our lives. So we felt that there was more than one story. If CSI gets to have spinoffs and if Law & Order gets to have spinoffs, and there's mileage in a show that does a criminal investigation in a certain way or shows how the police and the legal system collaborate, couldn't there be that for a comedy? I know there's been That '80s Show; there's been a few other format spinoffs that haven't worked. I think Carter and I always feel like Barney's line "Challenge accepted!" is very much from Carter and I whenever someone tells us we can't do something. People will say, "Comedies can't do that. Spinoffs only work if it's like Frasier. You choose the right beloved character, and you spin it off in the right way." If you do it wrong, it's The Tortellis on Cheers or something. Cheers has the two extremes of how it can go: Frasier and The Tortellis. But this idea that you can't do a format spinoff for a comedy, it's like, "Challenge accepted." We want to at least try. It's worth writing 48 pages. Some people are like, "Oh, are you scared of trying that? Are you going to piss people off? Is it going to diminish How I Met Your Mother's legacy?" It's like, we want to try to write one episode of this other version of it and see if it's anything. If it's good, we'll shoot it, and if it's not, we won't.
Question: You invented this format anyway.
Thomas: Yeah, and why do hour-long dramas get to have all the format spinoff fun? That's kind of the question that intrigued us. It's certainly worth one script, is what we figured.
IGN: How I Met Your Mother is going out on top; it's the highest-rated comedy on CBS's Monday night lineup. Without saying, "We're a sure thing!" you have to feel like there's gotta be a pretty good shot for the spinoff to go forward.
Thomas: I mean, you never know. Statistically, there haven't been these format spinoffs in comedy. Would we love to be one of the first ones of those to succeed? It would be an honor. It's an interesting challenge, but it's one that we wouldn't have done without Emily Spivey. We would not have proceeded, mainly because we wanted our attention to be on finishing How I Met Your Mother right, right? Right now, that's our main focus, and Emily is working really hard on the pilot, so we built that system of doing it. There's no such thing as a sure thing. I mean, look at that cast that was up there today -- the chemistry of those five people -- and then, weirdly, the chemistry of Cristin coming into it, we recognize how rare that is. So How I Met Your Dad is only going to succeed if we cast it right. That's true of any show ever. But the idea that we're at a loss because we're in the shadow of How I Met Your Mother is I think not true, because any pilot that's just 48 pages that doesn't have the actors yet can fail, even if it's really cleverly written. You just need those stars to align. So hopefully we cast it right. Hopefully we'll be announcing some exciting casting news on that in the coming weeks. It will live or die based on one review. I think we're good writers, but I think ultimately it comes down to "Does an audience want to spend time with these human beings?" We need to somehow have lightning strike twice, and we're optimistic enough to try.
