For the first time in the history of How I Met Your Mother, someone is joining the gang. Following her brief cameo at the end of the season 8 finale as the Mother, Cristin Milioti has been instantly promoted to series regular for the show’s ninth and final season.
For eight years, the main cast of How I Met Your Mother has been just the five principle stars. Adding Milioti as a series regular makes sense since she is the Mother and Ted’s future wife, but it also means we’ll get to see a whole lot of her.
However, this doesn’t mean we’ll be seeing her with Ted. The final season of How I Met Your Mother will, in fact, take place entirely during Barney and Robin’s wedding weekend, beginning where we left off, Friday at 10am, 56 hours before the wedding. Fans can bank on learning how everyone else met the Mother before Ted throughout the season.
While some might be worried about doing an almost 24-style season that only covers less than three days of time, I have faith that How I Met Your Mother can do it. The show’s best trait is its ability to find unique ways to tell its stories. From the memorable “Three Days of Snow” to Barney’s elaborate Playbook stratagems to the ongoing saga of Ted and the goat, the show has always played with the concept of time, telling stories in layered, complex ways, weaving a beautiful tapestry.
The final season will simply take that idea one step further. Since they know it’s the last season going into it, they can carefully map out how everything will work and then have fun getting there. It seems to be a popular trend in comedy these days.
ABC just ordered a new sitcom, Mixology, where the entire first season will take place over the course of a single night at a bar with 10 singles. And the fourth season of Arrested Development, coming to Netflix on May 26, will apparently feature a different character’s story in each episode, meaning some jokes may start in one episode, but a punchline won’t come until someone else’s episode.
TV fans are more sophisticated than they were in the past, and HIMYM fans are at the top of that trend. The show has repeatedly made use of the phrase “We’ll get to that later” (Robin’s boyfriend played by Michael Trucco, the goat, the ducky tie, the ongoing Slap Bet, the build-up to Lily and Marshall’s wedding, etc.). The fans can handle an entire season spanning three days.
Most importantly, Milioti being upped to series regular status is enough to make fans confident that the writers know what they’re doing. There was a real worry that the introduction of the Mother was a tease and that she would then go back to obscurity until the end of the final season. Keeping her around all year is a good thing because fan’s will get to know her, hopefully grow to love her, so when Ted finally meets her, we’ll be happy for him instead of scratching our heads saying “Who the heck is that chick?”
(Image courtesy of CBS)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
John watches nearly every show on TV, but he specializes in sci-fi/fantasy like The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood. However, he can also be found writing about everything from Survivor and Glee to One Tree Hill and Smallville.
