An Interview with Creators Carter Bays & Craig Thomas for How I Met Your Mother Season 8

Reacquaint yourselves with the gang when How I Met Your Mother returns for an eighth season filled to the brim with huge revelations and standout episodes. The much-loved, award-winning sitcom hits DVD on 30 September 2013 from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

Set in Manhattan, the seven-time Emmy-award winning show stars Josh Radnor (Liberal Arts), Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), Cobie Smulders (Avengers Assemble), Neil Patrick Harris (The Smurfs) and Alyson Hannigan (American Pie); focusing on a future Ted Mosby (Radnor) recounting to his son and daughter the events that led to him meeting their mother, each episode flits back and forth in time to showcase the hilarious hi-jinks and escapades of five friends living in New York.

Season 8 starts with the beginning of the end as we glimpse the future wedding of Barney (Harris) to his bride, shockingly revealed at the climax of the previous season to be Robin (Smulders). Back in the present, the gang contend with ‘The Autumn of Break-Ups’ as relationships helplessly fall apart, whilst Lily (Hannigan) and Marshal (Segel) host a quiz show to decide who would make the best godparent for their new-born son… With weddings, revelations and clues aplenty, could we finally be on the cusp of learning just how Ted met the mother of his children?

With guest appearances from Seth Green (Austin Powers), Alexis Denisof (Much Ado About Nothing) and Ashley Benson (Spring Breakers), not to mention a cameo appearance from Mike Tyson, now’s the time to learn why the hugely-loved sitcom – deemed this generation’s Friends – is must-watch television as How I Met Your Mother Season 8 is released on 30 September 2013 courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

How I Met Your Mother Creators Carter Bays & Craig Thomas discuss Comic-Con, THAT proposal and the reveal of the mother…

Can you talk about the piece with Ted’s kids all grown up that you showed at Comic Con?

Craig Thomas: We hadn’t seen Lyndsy (Fonseca) and David (Henrie) in years and years and years, and one of the funny things is, they walked in and it was like, “They don’t look that different, actually.” They didn’t look quite as different as we wanted them to, but it was so good to see them.

Carter Bays: They are the luckiest kids in show business. We’ve been sending them paychecks for eight years.

Craig Thomas: That was a good gig! But we hadn’t seen them in years, they came in, and we hadn’t even really talked to them about what the script was – and it’s dirty. So we were like, “You’re cool with this?” And they were like, “Fuck, yeah!” They were totally into it and they loved the idea. I mean, they’ve been frozen as children on television for eight years: they can’t age, and they can’t leave that couch, so getting to come back and play with that and subvert it a little bit was really fun for them. It was great to see that.

How was Comic Con, and meeting all those fans of the show after so many years?

Carter Bays: It was fantastic, so cool. We had wanted to go there for eight years. It was definitely on our bucket list, and it was amazing to see all those fans of the show in one room.

Craig Thomas: We don’t shoot in front of a live studio audience, so we don’t get to connect with the fans in that way as often as we would like, so that was amazing. It was a love fest and we love our fans so much. That was just a joy and a beautiful experience for all of us.

What are some of your favourite TV shows in the writers’ room that maybe influence your writing of How I Met Your Mother?

Craig Thomas: Game Of Thrones. I’ve never fallen off my couch as hard as I fell off my couch at the ‘Red Wedding’ episode of Game Of Thrones. But we watch a lot of one-hour dramas, and we regard How I Met Your Mother as not purely a sit-comedy – there’s a lot of drama in our show – so we both love Mad Men, we love Game Of Thrones, we love Downton Abbey. Obviously, we loved Freaks And Geeks and Buffy The Vampire Slayer otherwise Alyson (Hannigan – ‘Lily’) and Jason (Segel – ‘Marshall’) wouldn’t be in our show. So that’s good comfort viewing when you go back to those sometimes. But the How I Met Your Mother writers’ room is big, big Game Of Thrones fans and we can reveal that in the same way that Barney is a big fan of Billy Zabka (‘Johnny’) in The Karate Kid…

Carter Bays: He always roots for the wrong people in movies.

Craig Thomas: Barney roots for the blond bad guy in movies… so Barney may or may not be a big fan of King Joffrey.

The show does manage to be emotional as well as very funny, is it important to get that heartfelt stuff in too?

Carter Bays: Yeah, I feel like every season we have a target of maybe half the episodes – and maybe we will hit that target with four or five of them – that at the end of the episode there’s a good cry, like a good ‘Ahh’ moment.

Tell us about some of your favourite moments from Season 8.

Craig Thomas: ‘The Final Page, Part Two’, that was one of my favourite episodes that year.

Carter Bays: Yeah, Barney’s proposal. That was an amazing episode. It was really fun to do.

Did you enjoy messing with the audience a little bit with that proposal, because we didn’t know what was going on!

Carter Bays: Oh yeah, that was great fun. You don’t want to play too many tricks on the audience, but I feel like that was a direct line from the end of Season 6 of Breaking Bad, just the way that there’s something going on that the audience isn’t privy to for a number of episodes, and then an amazing reveal of, “Oh! This is what we’ve been seeing.”

Craig Thomas: We came up with the idea that, “Wouldn’t it be great if Barney proposed via his one last greatest and final play?” We just had the idea that it’s his last play, the last one he’ll ever have to run, which kind of made us feel choked up a little bit. All of his whole life, his playbook exists just so that he can run this one last play to get the girl. That just made us smile.

Carter Bays: It felt like a proposal only Barney could do.

Craig Thomas: It was a proposal only Barney could do and, yes, it resulted in us kind of screwing with the audience for many episodes in a row, but I hope the payoff was worth it. It was our Christmas episode, it started snowing as he proposes. That was probably one of my favourite moments of Season 8.

Carter Bays: And also getting to finally reveal the mother.

Craig Thomas: The moment of revealing the mother was a moment we pictured shooting for eight years. Carter and Pam (Fryman – Director) and I were just standing at a monitor shaking, like, “We can’t believe that we’re shooting this.” It’s just something you picture for so long. It’s like picturing your own wedding day. You think about it for years and years, and it was surreal to think about something for that long and then finally to be doing it. I can only imagine what the very end of Season 9 will feel like. Way too intense.

Is it true you have already shot part of the final ending of the series, and you shot it very early on because of the child actors’ ages?

Carter Bays: That is true, yeah. We shot a little piece of the very end of How I Met Your Mother with the kids in Season 2 before they got too old. An amazing stroke of foresight, which was probably more naiveté than anything else, in the off chance that the show would go on a long time. But we covered our bases, we knew how we wanted to end the series right from the beginning, so we decided to just go ahead and shoot it, and thank goodness we did! We haven’t looked at the footage yet though, actually. It’s interesting, we know what’s on there but haven’t actually sat down and looked at it, so hopefully no one taped over it.

Craig Thomas: The very end has not changed, so when they were still kids we shot this little piece, and it has to do with how the series ends. But when we saw the actors, the funny thing is we said, “We’re going to get to that piece this year, we’re ending the series,” and David was like, “I know. That was amazing. That’s such a cool piece that we shot.” And Lyndsy was like, “I have no memory of shooting that.” [LAUGHS] So one of them has the secret. I was thanking them for keeping it secret all these years and Lyndsy was like, “I forgot it, so you don’t even have to thank me.”

At the end of Season 8 we finally get to see the mother, can you talk about casting Cristin Miloti?

Craig Thomas: I got to see her in the show Once on Broadway, and Cristin was amazing in that show.

Carter Bays: And her one episode of 30 Rock was hilarious. She’s this fantastic character that holds her own against everyone else in the cast and it’s this actress that you’ve never seen before. So that felt like – yeah, we got something very special with Cristin.

Craig Thomas: Cristin Milioti has chemistry with everyone in the world and probably street signs and parked cars, too. She just has immediate chemistry, and that is also something I would say about Josh – he has amazing chemistry with people, so when they finally do get together in the final season it’s going to be amazing. She’s just instantly charming, the perfect choice, we have zero percent second-guessing regret.

How hard was it to shoot that scene where she buys a train ticket and keep the revelation of the mother secret?

Craig Thomas: It’s the most we’ve ever tried to keep something secret, obviously. We shot it on this other stage, because our stage is full of the existing set, so we built this big train station set that you see in the season finale and we didn’t have any extras. Everyone else you see walking around are the How I Met Your Mother writers, ADs, PAs, everybody, which was great. It was like a family affair. No strangers or outsiders were part of it and we just locked it down. We made everybody that was there – not that we don’t trust our cast and crew – but everybody signed confidentiality agreements and we were terrified for a month and a half between when it was shot and when it aired. Every day we were terrified that it would get out, but it didn’t and that was great.

Finally, we love the slaps.

Craig Thomas: There are two certainties in life: death and slaps.

Carter Bays: Yeah, death and getting slapped in the face.

HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER: SEASON 8 IS OUT NOW ON DVD