Dude, Neil Patrick Harris returns to TV to find out How I Met Your Father
Barney Stinson is back, and it will presumably be legendary
Aux News How I Met Your Father
Fans of the How I Met Your Mother spin-off, How I Met Your Father, were in for a legendary treat last night. Toward the end of the episode, HIMYM star Neil Patrick Harris returned for a brief cameo. Thankfully for those interested in seeing more of his womanizing ways, it doesn’t seem like a one-off.
Per TVLine (via Deadline), Harris will suit up for more investigations into how fathers are met. In his brief cameo, Sophie (Hilary Duff) rear-ends Barney’s Audi, Harris says his signature catchphrase (“Dude!”), and Kim Cattrall, the show’s titular “I,” takes the screen to assure her impatient kids that we’d hear more about Mr. Stinson “soon enough.” The show barrels ahead, returning to Duff stepping to the “Electric Slide.”
Last year, HIMYM star Colbie Smoulders made a guest appearance on the show, reviving her character Robin. Speaking to TV Line, the creators of How I Met Your Father explained how and why they brought the character back.
“Whenever we talk about bringing back a member of the original crew, you want it to serve two purposes: You want to give some tidbits about what is going on in their lives, where they’ve landed and where they’re at,” Issac Aptaker said. “But it’s also about how they impact the How I Met Your Father story, and how they send one of our characters in a new, unexpected direction. Similar to Robin last year, we’ll learn some more about where Barney’s at, but it’ll also have a major impact on the trajectory, and main narrative, of our season.”
Aptaker also joined Cattrall in teasing more Stinson, saying we’d “have to wait and see” what comes of the character. “That car crash becomes a major turning point in Sophie’s life and in her season-long arc. Once we catch up to that, I think people will be pleasantly surprised by how her story turns via Barney.” However, both Aptaker and co-creator Elizabeth Berger are well aware of the timeline disruption this does to their show. In all likelihood, Barney will not be Sophie’s dad because Aptaker and Berger are “not telling a teen dad story,’ which would “become a pretty uncomfortable story.”
Want to find out How I Met Your Father? Answers stream on Hulu on Mondays.
27 Comments
I’d love them to make a Neil Patrick Harris cameo of some sort on Cobra Kai, especially because … you know.
one of the best moments of the show.
Sophie’s dad? Am I reading this wrong? Do you mean future husband? Anyway I heard somewhere they are pairing Hilary Duff with John Corbett…62 and 36…jesus.
It’s been a while since I watched S1 but I think Duff’s character has never met her dad because her mom dated one random dude after another. So I think the obvious first thought many people would have is Barney knocked up her mom and could be her secret dad. But that would be pretty lame.
ah, thanks for clarifying…I mean…I could watch the show…but I don’t want to. So she’s going to bang John Corbett and find out he’s her dad? If this show was on HBO that would be the obvious plot.(maybe they’re lying about Corbett being cast as her love interest and sending out the pictures of them kissing as feint and he’s been cast as her dad, but no reason not to make a gross joke first!)
The linked interview suggests that there’s also a secondary mystery involving Sophie’s father, in addition to the future children’s father. Haven’t watched the show, but it sounds very weird:
‘In the episode, Future Sophie begins to tell her son the story of how
she hit “rock bottom.” We then cut back to the present timeline — albeit
later in the year — to find 30-year-old Sophie driving through the
suburbs, frantically trying to make contact with Lori. “Mom, please call
me back,” she says. “I think I’m dating my dad!” Wait, what??’
oh this is what I predicted in my other response. Barf.
I heard they’re pairing Hilary Duff with Jesus…36 and 2,022…gadzooks!
he doesn’t date anybody over aleph zayin years old
If I remember right without watching the finale again, Barney eventually gets a girl pregnant (was it 2020?) and then basically becomes an incredible dad as it’s implied – fatherhood completely changes his life and him for the better.
Does the show take place today? As in 2022/23? If so…. Barney’s daughter could be a few years old and he shares custody with the mother?
I mostly enjoy the new show, and loved HIMYM, but these cameos just leave me trying to figure out where in the timeline all these characters are now.This show does take place in current day. I assume Robin and Barney are divorced at this point?
Robin and Barney got divorced before the end of the original show, per Ted, so I’d certainly assume that was before our present day.
The mention of the divorce was a flash-forward into the years after the finale in 2014. Although since the last season took place over one weekend, they were actually in 2013. And just looked it up and they divorced after three years, so I guess in 2016.
So there you go!
Yah, that’s correct. In the finale and the flash forwards, I believe they got divorced in 2016? So they’ve been divorced for a few years a this point. Barney had his kid in 2020 I believe so he should be a father (and it’s implied that he’s a great dad) at this point in ‘Father’.
From the ‘Father’ pilot we learn they’re living in the apartment, and the ‘old married couple’ who posted on the Wesleyan website was clearly Marshall & Lily and Marshall ran for NY supreme court justice in 2020 (and won), and finally Ted & Tracy are living in Westchester in Ted’s fixer upper house… and as we know Tracy will die in 2024 due to some undisclosed terminal illness.
I hope we get a Marshall and Lily cameo at some point, just so we can see their absurd “old age” makeup when they were supposed to be in their late 40s. Marshall was bald and liver-spotted and Lily was styled like Ladybird Johnson.
The show takes place in the future 2050 where Sophie is telling her son the story of how she met his father through flashbacks to our present 2022.
Josh Radnor, meanwhile, waits by the phone desperately hoping for someone to please call
I assume they’re holding onto that card to play much later, though if Barney’s going to be a season-long recurring character then it wouldn’t be hard to contrive a scene where Ted is also there
“Man, I hope no one’s been critically reevaluating my character’s actions and choices, determining that he’s actually the worst person on the show,” he mumbles to himself.
I didn’t know that required reevaluation, I’m pretty sure most people had determined that by the end of the show.
Too late. I recently finished a rewatch of the series for the first time since it ended, and if I took a drink everytime I called Ted “a piece of shit”, I would’ve died from alcohol poisoning.
Someone’s gotta explain this to me, because I swear to God people are watching a different show sometimes. I know Ted gets a lot of hate, but on a show that designates Barney as a ‘lovable rapscallion’ – a character who commits several cancellable acts each episode, some of which would be considered rape in certain jurisdiction – I just cannot see how Ted winds up being the ‘piece of shit.’
Then there’s Lily, who the showrunners want to be the ‘mother hen’ figure of the group but whose behavior often ends up being manipulative, controlling and self-centred.Ted’s main flaws are that he’s kinda pretentious and a gooey romantic. By the standards of the show’s morality he’s nowhere near being a piece of shit (except when he turns into Barney’s accomplice).
They’re all terrible assholes, except Marshall. I think that was kind of the point of the show.
This show is annoyingly confusing, as to who is what to who…. it’s like an Appalachian family. I grew up in Asheville, so I can joke about it…
In other words, Neil Patrick Harris’ show Uncoupled got canceled by Netflix, and the man’s got two kids and is thinking about their college tuition.
I want so much to like this show but MAN they have too many characters that seem useless. I’d dump the brit and ellen or maybe valentina and try to tighten things up