So why did the informal panel for “How I Met Your Mother” involve only one member of the cast? Not that we’re complaining, you understand – if you’re gonna have one member, it might as well be Neil Patrick Harris – but, y’know, the absence of Cobie Smulders, Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, and Alyson Hannigan was certainly an obvious one…so obvious, in fact, that co-creator Carter Bays didn’t even wait for anyone to mention it.
“You probably read it in the paper,” said Bays. “It was just creative differences. The other four…we’ll figure it out. We’ll write around it.”
(Actually, Smulders was in London, doing Shakespeare, while Hannigan showed up later in the evening at CBS’s all-star party; no word on where Segel or Radnor were, but the former was probably working on the movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which he wrote and stars in. As to the latter, I got nothing.)
I know I wasn’t the only critic in the house to be completely psyched about this panel, and, certainly, Harris, Bays, and Bays’ fellow co-creator, Craig Thomas, left everyone laughing.
* Earlier in the morning, Nina Tassler indicated that the show would finally, finally begin to get around to answering the question as to who the mother of Ted’s kids is, but one of the other reporters asked what all us were more or less thinking: “How much can you hint around before it starts to get annoying?”
“That’s the question we hope to answer,” said Thomas. “In episode one (of the third season), we’re going to see…basically, it’s going to be the biggest connection to the sort of larger search for the mother; episode one will show that we have not forgotten the title of our show, in a very exciting way.”
Bays also confirmed that, much as longtime fans have theorized, there have indeed been hints in previous episodes which will, in retrospect, become notably important. “Yeah, the thing that we love to do…sometimes, we plant things intentionally. Sometimes, little things grow out of…we’ll write one joke in season one, and that will turn into a entire episode in season three. So yeah, I think everything’s up for grabs. It’s in there.”
* The fantastic mall episode – which brought us the wickedly insidious Robin Sparkles song, “Let’s Go To The Mall” – was written by Kourtney Kang. The reason for Robin being Canadian occurred organically – Smulders is from Canada as well – but the writers have had to start taking it easy on the jokes about our neighbors up North. “It’s such filthy luctre for writers,” says Bays. “At first, it was just like, ‘We’ll just throw in a joke about how she’s Canadian,’ and we just couldn’t stop ourselves. And in every episode, we’re just making fun of it.”
Craig Thomas clarified the situation a bit more. “We approached Cobie and we said, ‘We’re going to make Robin Canadian. We’re going to do some comedy about that, but it’s going to be really smart. It’s going to be, like, our smart way of, like, showing the absurdity of American culture.’ And we didn’t do that even one time. We just completely sold her out immediately.”
