How I Met Your Father Lives Up To Expectations

How I Met Your Father, the sequel to the long-running How I Met Your Mother, lives up to the expectations as the series begins on Hulu.

In another world, maybe How I Met Your Dad would still be on the air. However, the world isn’t perfect and it never made it to series. In any event, it took a few years for another attempt to get off the ground. I’m happy to report that How I Met Your Father lives up to my expectations after watching the first four episodes.

Series creators Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger have found ways to tie the new series into the one that many of us love. They also find ways to improve on the original series. As much as I enjoyed HIMYM, it lacked a lot of diversity in terms of the core cast. The new series does a character who is really new to New York but the diversity is much different in general. One thing that the series fixes in the opening episodes is no womanizing. Listen, as much as many of us enjoy watching Neil Patrick Harris play Barney, womanizing is out in 2022.

The gist of the series is that Sophie (Hilary Duff, younger; Kim Cattrall, older) tells her son about how she met his father. Unlike the original, we never see him on screen in the first few episodes while we see older Sophie. I’m not going to get into the specifics but she takes it all the way back to the beginning from when she met Ian through a dating app. But thanks to a phone mishap in a car, Sophie, roommate Valentina (Francia Raisa) and her new boyfriend, Charlie (Tom Ainsley), start hanging out with Jesse (Christopher Lowell), Sid (Suraj Sharma), and Jesse’s sister, Ellen (Tien Tran).

The pilot has the importance of introducing everyone. Once we get past the initial character introductions, How I Met Your Father starts to set up the rhythm and tone for the rest of the series. It’s going to be a lot of fun so sit back and enjoy the ride.

I love that there is somehow a version of 2021 and 2022 in which a pandemic does not exist. Maybe it’s wishful thinking on this end but a pandemic comedy isn’t something I want to watch right now. Let me just say thank you.

Things have changed since the original series in terms of technology. What hasn’t changed is that people are still figuring out their lives. This is where the series is ripe for its comedy offerings. However, streaming is different from network television. There are no commercial breaks so the series is slightly longer in episode offerings. But like its broadcast counterpart, numbers are everything and this will almost certainly determine the future. When will we meet the father? You’re guess is as good as mine.

Time will tell if the stand-alone How I Met Your Father becomes a fan-favorite series like its predecessor but the opening episodes offer a lot of fun.

CREATORS: Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Isaac Aptaker, Elizabeth Berger, Carter Bays, Craig Thomas, Pam Fryman, Adam Londy
CAST: Hilary Duff, Christopher Lowell, Francia Raisa, Tom Ainsley, Tien Tran, Suraj Sharma
RECURRING CAST: Kim Cattrall, Daniel Augustin, Ashley Reyes and Josh Peck