Carter Bays

Adventurous and inventive, the cheesy-looking How I Met Your Mother redefined what a sitcom can be

The new season of How I Met Your Mother started tonight, so you might want to check out Hitfix’s interview with co-creator Carter Bays. He talks mostly about the themes of last season — mostly, putting Ted through a lot of bad stuff, dropping obviously false hints about who The Mother might be, and hiding two pregnancies in very awkward ways — but does mention a few things planned for this season, particularly one thing that became apparent in the season premiere: Ted is going to be more well-adjusted and happy than last year. Whether this is considered pleasing, or just an excuse for him to be an even more annoying person than he usually is (he sometimes turns human in episodes where he is made to suffer, particularly the memorable “Shelter Island”), is for the viewer to decide.

How I Met Your Mother co-creator Carter Bays is from the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, so Cleveland magazine tracked him down and did a long article on him and the autobiographical nature of the show. Ted and Marshall are based, respectively, on Bays and his writing/producing partner Craig Thomas — Bays was the single guy from Ohio, Thomas was the guy who’d been in a relationship with one woman seemingly forever — and the catchphrase “Have You Met Ted?” is based on the way a friend of theirs used to introduce Bays to women. I think one reason why HIMYM has developed the following it has is that, like Seinfeld, it has that unusual balance between realism and craziness: most of the plots are based on things that could, and did, happen to real people, but the working-out of those plots tends to be wacky and crazy. Usually the crazy shows are the ones that have less down-to-earth stories — look at 30 Rock, which only became good once it more or less abandoned the reality of working on a late-niht comedy show — and the shows that are recognizably realistic are not particularly wacky (Everybody Loves Raymond was another show where most plots were based on real things that happened, but it rarely went “big” with those stories). A show that feels realistic and unrealistic at the same time is a fun and unusual mix for sitcom viewers.