The gang’s all here! How I Met Your Mother was a pop culture phenomenon during its nine-season run, and in the years that followed. It’s also a series that has brought about as many laughs as it did tears.
Created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, How I Met Your Mother told leading man Ted Mosby’s (Josh Radnor) love story in reverse — ultimately leading up to the moment where he meets the mother of his children. Radnor starred alongside Alyson Hannigan (Lily Aldrin), Jason Segel (Marshall Eriksen), Neil Patrick Harris (Barney Stinson) and Cobie Smulders (Robin Scherbatsky).
The series, which ran on CBS from 2005 to 2014, also featured the late bob Bob Saget narrating as a future version of Ted Mosby.
“Something about How I Met Your Mother was [that] it always upended your expectations,” Radnor told HuffPost Live in 2016. “It always made you cry, it always was not what you thought it was.”
The acclaimed show’s ending was plotted out years in advance. However, when HIMYM wrapped in 2014, longtime fans voiced their disappointment for the series finale due to its controversial ending.
Four years later, Smulders spoke out in defense of the sitcom’s final moments. “I will say, I’ve had people tell me when they binge watch it [now], they don’t really have a problem with the ending,” she told Newsweek in December 2018. “It makes sense to them. That is what our creator sort of intended from the beginning.”
Shortly after the show concluded, it was announced that a spinoff series titled How I Met Your Dad was in the works at CBS with Bays, Thomas and Emily Spivey. The project was ultimately scrapped, but This Is Us coexecutive producers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger were then tapped to take on the project two years later.
Aptaker and Berger, however, soon found themselves too busy to juggle developing the sitcom spinoff after being promoted to executive producers/co-showrunners on This Is Us. The following year, Alison Bennett — a writer and producer known for FX’s You’re the Worst — subsequently took over.
The spinoff was officially confirmed in April 2021, with Hilary Duff in the lead role. The series cast Francia Raisa, Tom Ainsley, Tien Tran, Surah Sharma, Chris Lowell, Josh Peck and Daniel Augustin before filming started in August 2021.
Scroll down to see where the How I Met Your Mother cast is now.
