What about Season 4 do you think captured the Emmy voters’ attention?
Creator and executive producer Carter Bays: “It’s taken us three years to be firing on all cylinders. I feel like the writers are getting better every year. The characters are that much better. In some way, I think it was the easiest season for us to do because there was no writers' strike and we weren’t in dire fear of our lives ratings-wise. That was maybe the year where we settled into a groove and really enjoyed what we were doing.”
What was your favorite episode from last season?
Bays: “I always talk about the Naked Man episode because that was so much fun to write. It was a classic example of a great
How I Met Your Mother episode coming out of an embarrassing moment in someone’s real life. [The Robin character goes on a date, and when the guy comes back to her apartment, he strips down naked when she leaves the room. She ends up sleeping with him because hey, he was already naked.] After that writer pitched it, it started coming out that a lot of people had experienced it—so much that we discovered this secret phenomenon of guys doing that. Some of the female writers had even been Naked Manned at some point. For us as writers to use the show as our collective diary and therapy session is a lot of fun.”
Both Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders got pregnant last season. How did that affect storylines?
Bays: “When Ally first came to us and said she was pregnant, the two big questions were, do we write this into the show or do we write around it? We played around with the idea that she had to care for an ailing grandmother or something… One of us pitched as a joke, ‘What about Barney saying something so offensive that she leaves for four weeks?’ We laughed about that and decided to use it. It was something we hadn’t seen on any other show. Plus, we’ve been trying to find ways to get that joke [A very dirty, Google-able punchline to the joke question, ‘What’s the difference between peanut butter and jam?’] in the show. Jason Segel apparently tried to get it into
I Love You, Man so it was nice that the joke finally made it into pop culture.”
Aside from the pregnancies, were there any other surprising developments last season?
Bays: “[Pairing] Barney and Robin was something we weren’t really sure about doing. It was something that a lot of people were strongly against. They’d say, ‘You can’t put Barney in a relationship, it’ll ruin it. Robin is the girl Ted was in love with for so many years, it’ll be strange for everyone.’ Having Ted deal with the problem of his friend being with his ex-girlfriend and Barney not being a relationship guy was good stuff to explore. Initially, we weren’t thinking about Barney and Robin, but by the end of the season, it had felt worth pursuing.”
An Emmy nomination puts the show, for better or worse, in a different league. How do you and the writers keep scripts fresh and challenging?
Bays: “We basically keep beating ourselves up. Certainly our cast has the ability to give America a really funny, classic sitcom, but I don’t think we’d ever feel good about doing that kind of show. It has to be something a little different. We like messing around with the structure too much. Our whole writing staff is filled with people who loved
Arrested Development and want to challenge the form as much as we can. Even as the classic multi-cam sitcom seems to be dwindling, maybe our true calling is to pick up the torch and carry it for all the
Three’s Company’s before us.”
Neil Patrick Harris is not only hosting the Emmys, he’s also nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. What is it about his character, Barney Stinson, that connects with people and is so memorable?
Bays: “I think as much of a cartoon as Barney can be, he speaks to a side of the American male psyche in the 21st century. There is a lot of depth to that character. This is all in Neil’s performance. I like being able to use that character to explore the questions, ‘What if you do all the things the media tells you to do? What if you become that guy who buys the right suits and does enough crunches in the morning? Who is that person?’ I certainly feel that Barney follows that path for the rest of us… I can’t imagine what it’s like for him to not only be nominated but to also put on a show for millions of Americans. Neil’s like an astronaut. He’s got guts and raw nerve.”
The chemistry among the five cast members is undeniable. How do you feel they complement each other?
Bays: “I definitely think that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and they’re great parts to begin with. There’s something about their chemistry as a group. We made the decision early on to not shoot the show in front of an audience. A large, hidden benefit to that has been that they’ve become each other’s audience...It’s very cool to reach this point where we know what our actors’ talents are and we’re able to write to them. I think that has something to do with why this year has caught on much more than in the past.”
In Season 4’s finale, how did you decide to reveal the detail that the Mother will turn out to be a student of Ted’s?
Bays: “That was a very late-breaking decision to reveal that the mom was in the classroom. Initially, it was just that he became a professor and that was it. In hindsight, we couldn’t have done it any other way. The potential Mother pool in New York City has now been shrunk down to the Columbia University campus. It’s heightened the intensity of the search, which we’ve always been careful to slowly play…We want the show to last as long as possible, so we take our time revealing stuff and bringing the mother into the world of the show. But this year felt like the right time to very, very gently dip our toes into [the idea that] there actually is a mother out there and we’re going to meet her soon.”
Toward the end of last season, you had a lot of viewers thinking Stella (Sarah Chalke) was possibly the Mother.
Bays: “I got so many angry calls about that. We try not to screw with the audience too much. I’m a huge fan of
Lost and I love it every time they screw with me. It’s such an abusive relationship. But we’re not
Lost, we’re a sitcom. We knew what the next two episodes were going to be and how the dominoes were going to fall so after that moment, it felt like it was a fun way to keep people awake.”
