Another potential spinoff of How I Met Your Mother is in the works.
How I Met Your Father is in development at 20th TV from This Is Us writers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
The ensemble show is told from the female point of view, in contrast to the original CBS series that ran for nine seasons. How I Met Your Father is a new take with an entirely new set of characters and writers. Similar in vein to the original, the project tells the story of how the main character met her eventual spouse.
Original series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas would serve as executive producers on the project, along with Aptaker and Berger. However, Bays and Thomas would not be involved directly because of their overall deal at competing studio Sony Television.
Aptaker and Berger are under an overall deal at 20th, which produces This Is Us and, like Bays and Thomas, the two have been writing partners for several years.
Bays and Thomas, along with Saturday Night Live alum Emily Spivey, created a How I Met Your Dad spinoff in 2014 that starred Greta Gerwig and featured the voice narration of Meg Ryan (as opposed to original star Josh Radnor and narrator Bob Saget). However, the pilot was surprisingly not picked up to series.
How I Met Your Mother continues to live on in syndication on cablers including FX and Lifetime. The half-hour, which ran on CBS from 2005-2014, helped launch the careers of then-unknowns Cobie Smulders, Jason Segel and Radnor, and opened a new chapter for TV veterans Neil Patrick Harris and Alyson Hannigan. Spinoffs and offshoots of familiar brands have become more and more popular in recent years as studios and networks aim to break through the clutter of the “Peak TV” era with the help of well-known IP.
