The ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Spin-Off Is Starting Over From Scratch
By Ethan Anderton/Aug. 9, 2017 2:30 pm EST
CBS ended up passing on the pilot, but the network is apparently still keen on figuring out how to make it work as they will have a new team of writers developing the series. But now they’re starting from scratch.
First up, a little background on the extensive history of development on How I Met Your Dad in the short three years it’s been in the works.
Greta Gerwig had been slated to take the lead as a character described as a “female Peter Pan” sort of character, while Meg Ryan had been tapped to narrate the series, just as comedian and Full House star Bob Saget had done on How I Met Your Mother. Unfortunately, CBS wasn’t impressed with the pilot. They tried to figure out how they could redo it in order to improve it, but it never came together.
Though How I Met Your Mother called CBS home, the spin-off wasn’t a CBS-owned property, which is part of the reason they didn’t exhaust themselves trying to fix the first pilot. If the network isn’t going to get any syndication revenue, the show isn’t quite as valuable to them as a show that they develop in-house. That also means there’s the chance How I Met Your Dad could end up on a network other than CBS when all is said and done.
It’s not clear if How I Met Your Mother creators Craig Thomas & Carter Bays or executive producer Emily Spivey are still involved. Even if they are though, there’s no guarantee that How I Met Your Dad could make references to events and characters from How I Met Your Mother, something that was mentioned as a possibility when the spin-off was first ind development. Since so much has changed since then, anything is possible, but this is all theoretical anyway.
For now, this is just a hopeful series. Plenty of shows comes and go during development season, never to be heard from again. Since this one has a built-in audience of sorts, the idea is already appealing, but if the show can’t turn into something unique that’s worth putting on TV, then we might never see it come to fruition. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
