With this week’s two-part premiere of How I Met Your Father, the spin-off to the hit CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother finally comes to fruition. The concept was first announced in 2013 while HIMYM was still on the air, and it has been in the works in some form or another for nine whole years, about as long as the original’s entire run.
The new show is serviceable, but despite the potential of its narrative twist, it can’t help but feel like a reminder of previous attempts at this kind of story. There have been several over the years, each an attempt to weave a similar tale from a woman’s perspective, but one of them is far superior to the rest. It’s also not a spin-off at all, but an episode of How I Met Your Mother itself — arguably one of its best — and revisiting it today even helps unlock why the series finale to that show may have missed its mark.
Created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, the original series ran from 2005 to 2014, and followed the romantic woes and the eventual (albeit truncated) grand love story of Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), which he narrates to his teenage children 25 years in the future (the older Ted is voiced by the late Bob Saget). The show began with Ted telling them the story of how he met their “Aunt Robin” (Cobie Smulders), an important character who weaves in and out of his life until he eventually meets the woman he would go on to marry, a character the show teases for several years before finally introducing. However, despite this long-running narrative, the show eventually circles back to the pairing of Ted and Robin in its 2030-set finale, revealing “the Mother” to have died several years prior. The show’s conclusion left more than a few fans unhappy.
Its planned spin-offs have all circled the same concept, but with a gender-swapped perspective. First, there was the fun 2014 pilot for an unrelated-but-similar show called How I Met Your Dad, which starred Greta Gerwig in the leading role. However, unlike HIMYM, this pilot introduces both parents to each other in Episode 1, leaving little room for the same kind of romantic mystery. Despite Bays and Thomas’ involvement, it was never picked up for a full season. Following this in 2016, Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger of ABC’s The Neighbors were tasked with reworking the failed spinoff into a new show called How I Met Your Father. In 2017, after Aptaker and Berger departed the project, there were plans for another version with the same title, to be written from scratch by Alison Bennet of FX’s You’re The Worst. These would never fully materialize.
Finally, a series also titled How I Met Your Father, now helmed by a returning Aptaker and Berger, was announced in 2021 — the same show now airing on Hulu, starring Hillary Duff — which is also a mostly-unrelated spin-off, though with a few hints and nods towards the original’s continuity. However, there’s a version of the concept that not only predates each of these spin-offs, but far outshines them: the 200th episode of How I Met Your Mother.
It also happens to function as a Rosetta Stone for why the original series’ finale was so incredibly divisive, and there’s an argument to be made that it was so successful at what it set out to do that it made the rest of the show — the finale especially — worse by comparison. It may technically be part of How I Met Your Mother, but its presentation puts it in the same league as the various spin-offs.
When the episode begins, the show’s usual title card is temporarily replaced. It reads:
HIMYM’s 24-episode final season took place over the course of a single weekend, with two exceptions: the finale, and the sixteenth episode, “How Your Mother Met Me,” both of which span several years. In its opening credits, the remixed 200th entry replaces the photographs of the show’s main characters with pictures of a brand-new friend group. Among them is one familiar face: Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti), a.k.a. “the Mother,” who was finally introduced at the end of Season 8 and went on to make a few brief appearances, though she and Ted are yet to meet at this point.
Rather than being a mere check list of events and Easter eggs, the episode tells an achingly beautiful story about loss, and about finding love once again.
The episode runs a mere 23 minutes, but in that time, it brings us up to speed on the last nine years of Tracy’s life, from a tragic event that unfolded concurrently to show’s pilot — the death of her boyfriend Max — to the many times she almost crossed paths with Ted and his pals, until finally the fated couple comes achingly close to meeting (they’re separated only by a hotel wall, as Ted listens to Tracy sing “La Vie En Rose” into the night air while strumming her ukulele). However, rather than being a mere check list of events and Easter eggs, the episode tells an achingly beautiful story about loss, and about finding love once again. It’s the kind of story the show tries to bring home in its series finale, in which Ted reveals to the audience that “the Mother” died several years ago — something strongly hinted at as far back as Season 7 and reinforced earlier in the episode — before asking his old flame Robin out on another first date, several decades later. This wrap-up isn’t bad on paper, but there are a couple of key reasons the finale doesn’t land, and they can both be found in Episode 200.
The first reason is that, even though both stories are mirrored conceptually, Episode 200 allows the audience to actually feel Tracy’s loss when she learns of Max’s death, despite him never appearing on-screen. In contrast, part of the disconnect in the finale stems from the casual-ness with which Ted and his children speak of the Mother’s passing. They have, of course, had several years to move on within the story, but this happens off-screen, so the audience is never afforded the same opportunity to mourn her. Meanwhile, in “How Your Mother Met Me,” Tracy’s grief lands with weight and precision, despite the episode’s swift pacing.
Part of this is owed to Milioti’s incredible ability to tell you not only about her own character, but about everyone around her, by the way she speaks to or about them. Her friends and roommates aren’t afforded nearly enough time to tell their own stories — a side-effect of nine years of Tracy’s life being condensed into less than half an hour — but the positions they each occupy, both in her daily life and along her arduous journey, are crystal clear. For instance, when she first meets the charmer Louis (Louis Ferrigno Jr.), Milioti plays the scene as if she’s caught in a tug-of-war between hesitance and possibility, which speaks both to how far she has (and hasn’t) re-emerged from her shell, and to how comforting a presence Louis may prove to be in their eventual romance, which mostly unfolds off-screen. We are, however, made privy to one pit-stop during their relationship, during which Tracy’s attempts to stave off her grief with humor and singsong gaiety don’t quite land with Louis. All it takes is a fleeting look of silent disappointment from Tracy to tell you all you need to know: He isn’t a bad guy; they just don’t always click.
Milioti’s talent at bringing other characters to life through her reactions alone even stems to the unseen Max — not only when she jokingly lampoons his tardiness when he doesn’t show up to dinner, but several years later, long after he’s died. When Louis proposes to her, she steps outside his cabin to ask Max for his permission to move on, whispering out into the universe in the hopes of a response that may not come. As she holds back tears, she makes brief mention of Max spending time playing baseball with his father up in heaven. It’s broad, saccharine, and slightly tongue-in-cheek (she knows she isn’t talking to anyone in particular; this “conversation” is her way of accepting her grief), but it’s delivered with such honesty and sincerity that it tells us what Max’s father meant to him, and what Max, in turn, meant to her.
This is part and parcel of the second reason the eventual finale missed its mark: the casting of the Mother. Not because Milioti was wrong for part, but because she was such a runaway success in her very brief time on screen that the rest of the story Bays and Thomas had planned couldn’t keep up with her, or with what she brought to “How Your Mother Met Me.”
Until Season 9, the Mother wasn’t a character, but an impossible concept built from sky-high expectations (Ted’s, as well as our own). Theorizing can be unhelpful, but one has to wonder if the finale would have received a marginally less angry response if Tracy weren’t so sweet and fully-formed, and Milioti weren’t so pitch-perfect for the part. Over the course of the 200th episode, we see many of the show’s events from her point of view, but they’re all bound by a consistent story, which finds her wrestling with whether or not she can — or even should — move on from Max, who she believed was her one and only soulmate. Before meeting Ted and falling in love with him in the final episode, she must first take slow and steady steps outside her own grief, and along the way must rebuild the balance between confidence and cheery shyness which we saw from her before she learned of Max’s death.
The episode not only succeeds where the finale failed — by inviting the audience to experience an emotional dilemma between bittersweet memories and moving forward despite trepidation — but it even ends up contributing to that failure by making the Mother so radiant and lovable that her eventual loss feels like a sudden betrayal.
However, at the heart of the final season is the idea — executed precisely in one episode, poorly in another — that time heals all wounds, so revisiting the show almost a decade later allows for a more discerning experience. Once its misfires are accepted, its successes begin to shine even more brightly. The 200th entry was both a high watermark for How I Met Your Mother, and a bar that future spin-offs would be unable to clear, and watching the whole episode back in retrospect allows for a greater focus on its heartwarming details. For instance, if Tracy playing her ukulele is what first makes Ted fall in love with her — the same love that helps her believe in love again — then the journey of that ukulele is just as important.
It was the birthday present that Max bought for her the day he died, and so it became a lasting symbol of her inability to let him go. A different show might have dramatized her journey of acceptance — of moving on so she can fall in love with Ted — by having her either get rid of the ukulele or put it away for good. Instead, it takes the opposite approach. Initially, her grief makes her turn her back on music for several years, until she’s finally able to find that side of herself again (she plays bass for a local band). The night she sings “La Vie En Rose,” after walking away from Louis, is the first time she picks up the ukulele in nine whole years.
That Ted falls in love with her while she’s playing the instrument — a symbol of how much Max loved her, and how deeply he understood her — is nothing if not Ted falling in love with her completely, with every part of her, including her grief. It’s nothing if not Tracy finally finding herself again, and moving forward not without Max, but with Max held close to her heart. Regardless of how the final episode wraps things up for Ted and Robin after Tracy’s death, “How Your Mother Met Me” sings the same tune, and does melodic justice to the very same idea: that even after unimaginable loss, people can hold different kinds of love in their heart without letting go of either one.
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The new show is serviceable, but despite the potential of its narrative twist, it can’t help but feel like a reminder of previous attempts at this kind of story. There have been several over the years, each an attempt to weave a similar tale from a woman’s perspective, but one of them is far superior to the rest. It’s also not a spin-off at all, but an episode of How I Met Your Mother itself — arguably one of its best — and revisiting it today even helps unlock why the series finale to that show may have missed its mark.
A Brief “How I Met Your” History
Created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, the original series ran from 2005 to 2014, and followed the romantic woes and the eventual (albeit truncated) grand love story of Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), which he narrates to his teenage children 25 years in the future (the older Ted is voiced by the late Bob Saget). The show began with Ted telling them the story of how he met their “Aunt Robin” (Cobie Smulders), an important character who weaves in and out of his life until he eventually meets the woman he would go on to marry, a character the show teases for several years before finally introducing. However, despite this long-running narrative, the show eventually circles back to the pairing of Ted and Robin in its 2030-set finale, revealing “the Mother” to have died several years prior. The show’s conclusion left more than a few fans unhappy.
Its planned spin-offs have all circled the same concept, but with a gender-swapped perspective. First, there was the fun 2014 pilot for an unrelated-but-similar show called How I Met Your Dad, which starred Greta Gerwig in the leading role. However, unlike HIMYM, this pilot introduces both parents to each other in Episode 1, leaving little room for the same kind of romantic mystery. Despite Bays and Thomas’ involvement, it was never picked up for a full season. Following this in 2016, Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger of ABC’s The Neighbors were tasked with reworking the failed spinoff into a new show called How I Met Your Father. In 2017, after Aptaker and Berger departed the project, there were plans for another version with the same title, to be written from scratch by Alison Bennet of FX’s You’re The Worst. These would never fully materialize.
Finally, a series also titled How I Met Your Father, now helmed by a returning Aptaker and Berger, was announced in 2021 — the same show now airing on Hulu, starring Hillary Duff — which is also a mostly-unrelated spin-off, though with a few hints and nods towards the original’s continuity. However, there’s a version of the concept that not only predates each of these spin-offs, but far outshines them: the 200th episode of How I Met Your Mother.
It also happens to function as a Rosetta Stone for why the original series’ finale was so incredibly divisive, and there’s an argument to be made that it was so successful at what it set out to do that it made the rest of the show — the finale especially — worse by comparison. It may technically be part of How I Met Your Mother, but its presentation puts it in the same league as the various spin-offs.
When the episode begins, the show’s usual title card is temporarily replaced. It reads:
How Your Mother Met Me
HIMYM’s 24-episode final season took place over the course of a single weekend, with two exceptions: the finale, and the sixteenth episode, “How Your Mother Met Me,” both of which span several years. In its opening credits, the remixed 200th entry replaces the photographs of the show’s main characters with pictures of a brand-new friend group. Among them is one familiar face: Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti), a.k.a. “the Mother,” who was finally introduced at the end of Season 8 and went on to make a few brief appearances, though she and Ted are yet to meet at this point.
Rather than being a mere check list of events and Easter eggs, the episode tells an achingly beautiful story about loss, and about finding love once again.
The episode runs a mere 23 minutes, but in that time, it brings us up to speed on the last nine years of Tracy’s life, from a tragic event that unfolded concurrently to show’s pilot — the death of her boyfriend Max — to the many times she almost crossed paths with Ted and his pals, until finally the fated couple comes achingly close to meeting (they’re separated only by a hotel wall, as Ted listens to Tracy sing “La Vie En Rose” into the night air while strumming her ukulele). However, rather than being a mere check list of events and Easter eggs, the episode tells an achingly beautiful story about loss, and about finding love once again. It’s the kind of story the show tries to bring home in its series finale, in which Ted reveals to the audience that “the Mother” died several years ago — something strongly hinted at as far back as Season 7 and reinforced earlier in the episode — before asking his old flame Robin out on another first date, several decades later. This wrap-up isn’t bad on paper, but there are a couple of key reasons the finale doesn’t land, and they can both be found in Episode 200.
The first reason is that, even though both stories are mirrored conceptually, Episode 200 allows the audience to actually feel Tracy’s loss when she learns of Max’s death, despite him never appearing on-screen. In contrast, part of the disconnect in the finale stems from the casual-ness with which Ted and his children speak of the Mother’s passing. They have, of course, had several years to move on within the story, but this happens off-screen, so the audience is never afforded the same opportunity to mourn her. Meanwhile, in “How Your Mother Met Me,” Tracy’s grief lands with weight and precision, despite the episode’s swift pacing.
Part of this is owed to Milioti’s incredible ability to tell you not only about her own character, but about everyone around her, by the way she speaks to or about them. Her friends and roommates aren’t afforded nearly enough time to tell their own stories — a side-effect of nine years of Tracy’s life being condensed into less than half an hour — but the positions they each occupy, both in her daily life and along her arduous journey, are crystal clear. For instance, when she first meets the charmer Louis (Louis Ferrigno Jr.), Milioti plays the scene as if she’s caught in a tug-of-war between hesitance and possibility, which speaks both to how far she has (and hasn’t) re-emerged from her shell, and to how comforting a presence Louis may prove to be in their eventual romance, which mostly unfolds off-screen. We are, however, made privy to one pit-stop during their relationship, during which Tracy’s attempts to stave off her grief with humor and singsong gaiety don’t quite land with Louis. All it takes is a fleeting look of silent disappointment from Tracy to tell you all you need to know: He isn’t a bad guy; they just don’t always click.
Milioti’s talent at bringing other characters to life through her reactions alone even stems to the unseen Max — not only when she jokingly lampoons his tardiness when he doesn’t show up to dinner, but several years later, long after he’s died. When Louis proposes to her, she steps outside his cabin to ask Max for his permission to move on, whispering out into the universe in the hopes of a response that may not come. As she holds back tears, she makes brief mention of Max spending time playing baseball with his father up in heaven. It’s broad, saccharine, and slightly tongue-in-cheek (she knows she isn’t talking to anyone in particular; this “conversation” is her way of accepting her grief), but it’s delivered with such honesty and sincerity that it tells us what Max’s father meant to him, and what Max, in turn, meant to her.
This is part and parcel of the second reason the eventual finale missed its mark: the casting of the Mother. Not because Milioti was wrong for part, but because she was such a runaway success in her very brief time on screen that the rest of the story Bays and Thomas had planned couldn’t keep up with her, or with what she brought to “How Your Mother Met Me.”
The Ending Before the Ending
Until Season 9, the Mother wasn’t a character, but an impossible concept built from sky-high expectations (Ted’s, as well as our own). Theorizing can be unhelpful, but one has to wonder if the finale would have received a marginally less angry response if Tracy weren’t so sweet and fully-formed, and Milioti weren’t so pitch-perfect for the part. Over the course of the 200th episode, we see many of the show’s events from her point of view, but they’re all bound by a consistent story, which finds her wrestling with whether or not she can — or even should — move on from Max, who she believed was her one and only soulmate. Before meeting Ted and falling in love with him in the final episode, she must first take slow and steady steps outside her own grief, and along the way must rebuild the balance between confidence and cheery shyness which we saw from her before she learned of Max’s death.
The episode not only succeeds where the finale failed — by inviting the audience to experience an emotional dilemma between bittersweet memories and moving forward despite trepidation — but it even ends up contributing to that failure by making the Mother so radiant and lovable that her eventual loss feels like a sudden betrayal.
However, at the heart of the final season is the idea — executed precisely in one episode, poorly in another — that time heals all wounds, so revisiting the show almost a decade later allows for a more discerning experience. Once its misfires are accepted, its successes begin to shine even more brightly. The 200th entry was both a high watermark for How I Met Your Mother, and a bar that future spin-offs would be unable to clear, and watching the whole episode back in retrospect allows for a greater focus on its heartwarming details. For instance, if Tracy playing her ukulele is what first makes Ted fall in love with her — the same love that helps her believe in love again — then the journey of that ukulele is just as important.
It was the birthday present that Max bought for her the day he died, and so it became a lasting symbol of her inability to let him go. A different show might have dramatized her journey of acceptance — of moving on so she can fall in love with Ted — by having her either get rid of the ukulele or put it away for good. Instead, it takes the opposite approach. Initially, her grief makes her turn her back on music for several years, until she’s finally able to find that side of herself again (she plays bass for a local band). The night she sings “La Vie En Rose,” after walking away from Louis, is the first time she picks up the ukulele in nine whole years.
That Ted falls in love with her while she’s playing the instrument — a symbol of how much Max loved her, and how deeply he understood her — is nothing if not Ted falling in love with her completely, with every part of her, including her grief. It’s nothing if not Tracy finally finding herself again, and moving forward not without Max, but with Max held close to her heart. Regardless of how the final episode wraps things up for Ted and Robin after Tracy’s death, “How Your Mother Met Me” sings the same tune, and does melodic justice to the very same idea: that even after unimaginable loss, people can hold different kinds of love in their heart without letting go of either one.
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