How I Met Your Father Narrowly Avoids Repeating A Ted & Marshall Problem
Warning: Contains spoilers for How I Met Your Father season 1.
The How I Met Your Mother spin-off, How I Met Your Father, has found an interesting workaround with Sid and Hannah that will help to avoid an old Ted and Marshall problem. With the spin-off series coming almost a decade after How I Met Your Mother aired its season 9 finale, the show has had plenty of time to consider what worked and what didn’t. Throughout How I Met Your Father season 1 there is a blend of borrowed stories and neatly avoided issues.
In How I Met Your Father, Sid (Suraj Sharma) and Hannah (Ashley Reyes) get engaged in the very first episode, but Hannah has to leave to head back to LA for her work. In the How I Met Your Father season 1 ending, it briefly appears as if the pair might split up over the strain of a long-distance relationship, but instead announce that they got married at the courthouse to avoid the stress of big weddings. However, Hannah is still set to head back to LA, continuing the pair’s long-distance relationship now that they are a married couple.
Just as Jesse (Christopher Lowell) and Sid share an apartment in How I Met Your Father, Ted (Josh Radnor) and Marshall (Jason Segal) shared the very same apartment at the beginning of How I Met Your Mother. However, Lily (Alyson Hannigan) lived with them as well and Ted kept living with the pair for a long time even after they got married. Lily highlighted how strange this might seem and there was a lot of back and forth over the issue in the series. By having Sid and Hannah be married but still long-distance, How I Met Your Father is neatly avoiding it being strange for Sid and Jesse to still share the apartment and dodges repeating a bunch of How I Met Your Mother arguments and plots verbatim.
How I Met Your Father keeping Sid and Jesse living together is also more reasonable as the show has focused on the money struggles that come with living in New York more than How I Met Your Mother ever did. This is especially as Sid and Hannah have discussed their tight financial situation, especially with Sid having impulsively bought a bar. Interestingly, the use of the set for prolonged periods as a central location for multiple characters has similar logistic benefits from a production standpoint. Using one large familiar set for multiple characters’ homes makes production easier and opens up certain stories that wouldn’t otherwise be simple to do, so it is understandable that How I Met Your Father came so close to repeating this Ted and Marshall problem.
Although How I Met Your Father has avoided repeating a How I Met Your Mother mistake, it does come at a probable cost to the show. How I Met Your Father has a larger central cast than the original series, but Hannah was absent for the majority of season 1. With Hannah set up to take a year placement in LA, it is likely that she will be absent for another year, which might see some repetition in Sid and Hannah’s storylines in How I Met Your Father season 2 created by avoiding this old How I Met Your Mother problem.