How I Met Your Mother Looks to Season 8... and Beyond?
The HIMYM producers talk about how much longer the show might go.
January 15, 2012
The 150th episode of How I Met Your Mother airs this coming Monday, a milestone few series reach. Not only that though, but the series is a bigger hit than ever, with its best ratings yet in Season 7.
How I Met Your Mother is already renewed for Season 8, but is that the end of the show? This past week, I was part of a group of TV journalists who sat down for lunch with HIMYM creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays, to discuss what's to come on the series and the unique position the show is in for a situation comedy, as it heads towards the ultimate reveal the title promises.
Episode 150: While not treated in as big a manner as reaching episode 100 or 200, episode 150 is still a big accomplishment.
That being the case, Bays reveals the episode is "about Marshall and Lily finally, officially moving out to Long Island, so it's kind of actually a big group shift. Chris Elliot is in it. It's a great episode and Chris is great in the show. We did some really fun stuff. So it's a fitting 150, because it's about a moment of big change in the dynamic of the group."
However, Thomas and Bays already are revealing Marshall and Lily's time in Long Island won't last very long. Said Bays, "That's not a permanent living arrangement. It's pretty fun, the shifts that happen in terms of where Marshall and Lily end up and how it sets up the next season."
In a season that has seen a few characters from the past return, Bays noted, "The weirdest character that comes back is Monday night, Stripper Lily comes back around. As set up two years ago. Doppelganger, Stripper Lily comes back this coming Monday night and it's weird."
Alyson Hannigan is actually pregnant right now, a fact she revealed to the HIMYM producers right as they were planning this episode. Bays recalled her telling them, "I can't believe you're dressing me as a stripper this week! The only upside is that my boobs are looking really good right now." Added Bays, "Watch the episode. You'll see! She looks great!" He also couldn't resist joking, "Maybe Stripper Lily will be the mom. Who knows?"
The Mother of All Questions: As always, the actual question of who the Mother is hangs over the show. When it comes to who to eventually cast in the role, Bays said they wondered if they should go with, "A crazy big name, or someone you've never heard of? It's a running debate. And it's getting more important that we answer that debate the further into the show we get. We're getting there."
They also are aware of the question of whether the show might introduce the mother and that's the end, or we meet her and then the show continues on for awhile with her among the cast. Bays and Thomas say they have known the answer to that question for years, stating, "We have a plan, we just can't tell you."
Will There Be a Season 9?: When CBS renewed How I Met Your Mother through Season 8 last year, it was widely presumed that would mark the end of the show. But not so fast… As Bays noted, the show is having its, "Best ratings ever by a mile," and suddenly when it comes to when the show might end, "These discussion are ratcheted up now. Is it done at 8? Could there be more? And it's become a little bit of a different discussion. Because everyone's contracted through [Season 8] right now – the actors and everybody. It's something we're talking to everybody about and trying to figure it out."
At the same time, Thomas says they continue to ask themselves, "Creatively, what does the story demand? And we never want to keep the show on longer than it needs to, just like we wouldn't want to end it before it really should end. But that is part of it… it is the best job any of us have ever had and we love it. We love each other. We love working together. I can honestly say it's amazing hearing Jason Segel say he wants to stick around for as long as the story needs to go, because he's a guy with a big movie career ."
As far as getting to the end and the challenges of not knowing exactly how much time is left on the show, Thomas explained, "We know what the big mileposts are… but it's something creatively we need to figure out, which is how much space is there between those mileposts? One life event, is it a five episode condition or a one episode condition? And so a lot of that we're trying to figure it out."
Could There be a Spinoff or Continuation?: if How I Met Your Mother, as we know it, comes to an end in the next couple of years, is there room for some sort of continuation? Said Bays, "That's come up. We've had general conversations about rewinding to 2005 and then doing a series called How I Met Your Father, clearly from the perspective of what was happening with the mother all those years. And occasionally she'll stumble through MacLaren's and you'll see people in the background." Bays stressed, "We've joked about that… but maybe let's do that!"
Thomas said another idea they've talked about was, "Finish the story at the end of Season 8 and then Season 9 is, 'Oh, by the way kids, I left some stuff out,' and it's just 24 little stories that took place over the course of the series, here and there. Like, 'Here's something funny that happened in 2006.'"
Said Bays, with a laugh, "Jesus, the wig budget of that season! It would be prohibitively expensive."
Ted and Robin: Said Thomas, "Without giving too much away, one key thing we're going to explore in the second half of the season is the fact that Ted and Robin, when they broke up in Season 2, the reason they broke up is they ask themselves the question, 'Where do you see yourself in five years?' And Robin thought she was going to be living in Russia or Afghanistan or wherever and it's five years later. We actually made it to that spot and it's interesting exploring why is it that Robin is still in this apartment, exactly where she was when Ted asked that question." Added Bays, "There's an episode where they literally do the five year re-assessment off that one line in their break up in Season 2."
When Ted's Season 1 love interest, Victoria, appeared earlier this season, she noted Ted and Robin's ongoing connection. Said Bays, "She called it. Victoria was kind of the fortune teller in that episode. She calls that there's going to be some fireworks involved with Ted and un-dealt with remaining feelings for Robin. And for sure, in February sweeps, we return to that in an interesting way. What Victoria came back to sort of prophesize will come true in February sweeps."
Said Thomas, "It's such a complicated relationship, Ted and Robin, and we just try to put ourselves in their shoes. What would this actually be like, to date someone and love someone as intensely as they love each other and then break up and actually remain friends and actually pull that off? And be roommates, which is rare! I don't think there's any specific life experience that anyone is drawing from – no one's actually been in that situation. But we try to imagine what it would be like and how would that really work? This season, we're slowly trying to explore that." Added Bays, "Some stuff happens that makes Ted and Robin question their living arrangements and how intimate they are as friends and is that actually way weirder than we're letting on – which I think it would be."
Barney and Robin: Meanwhile, Robin and Barney hooked up again earlier this season. But does Robin firmly deciding she doesn't want kids close the door on them in the long term, considering Barney does now seem to want kids? Noted Bays, "Barney also wants to have kids in a very hypothetical sense. He thinks having kids will just sort of be cool. He made fun of that baby for pooping in its diaper! He might not totally be ready to be a dad! So we kind of have to call Barney out on whether he really wants to have kids. So we don't look at that as a singular deal breaker between Barney and Robin.
I think Barney is starting to become a real boy over the last couple of seasons. He's starting to want more, emotionally. But he's still Barney."
As for Robin, Bays said, "We're going to see her career take off in a new way, because she was always a career girl. She's going to start to go that way. And there is going to be a new romantic interest thrown into Barney's world in the form of Becky Newton. So we're going to watch them move in different directions for a little while, and those two characters and those two actors have this huge, crazy chemistry that I can't say we're done exploring.
When it comes to Robin's current boyfriend, Kevin (Kal Penn), Thomas acknowledged, "The water's don't run as deep with Kevin as they do with, say, Barney and Ted and we kind of explore that. He's been fun having around and we love Kal – he's been great to work with. I think his energy in the group is a fun dynamic to paly. But we'll see. The month of February will answer a lot of questions and resolve a lot of things that have been kind of simmering below the surface." He also noted that Barney is still hurting from Robin choosing Kevin over him, "and we're not going to forget about that."
The Very End Has Already Been Filmed (Well, Some of It): I'd heard before that the producers had shot a seen for the end of How I Met Your Mother years ago with Lyndsy Fonseca and David Henrie, who remain forever young in the reaction footage of Ted talking to his kids in 2030. Thomas and Bays confirmed that is true, with Bays saying, "We shot it. It answers a ton of question. It's in a vault and we shot it and we had them sign confidentially forms and we cleared out our whole set to one cameraman."
The Wedding: We know that Barney has a wedding in his future, and as Bays noted, "We've promised the where of how Ted meets the mother. We took a very big swing a the beginning of Season 6 and we realized we were ruling out a lot of types of things that we've done before. Is this girl walking down the street the mother? Now you know she's not. It has to be this wedding day. So that was a big swing. I Remember feeling a sense of loss when we did that. We can't do those fake outs anymore! But we'd done a bunch of them and we felt like we kind of got all of the ball on that. It was reinvigorating for us to pinpoint it more. That for us was a big shift in the series, once we nailed that down. Now you don't care about Ted and Zooey as much, in that moment, because it's like, "Well, I know she's not the mother." But it's still part of Ted's story. It's still part of the life story. It's a chapter."
For fans who say that knowing Ted meets the mother at a wedding makes any other woman he dates a waste of time, Thomas counters, "Then it's like every show is wasting your time. You could be reading a book or doing your taxes or something. It's telling a life story."
Added Bays, "It's an account of his years in his twenties and his thirties and all of his friends. Ultimately, if the series isn't worthwhile past that one question, we're in trouble and we wouldn't have been around this long."
Hello, Megan. Thanks.
