The How I Met Your Mother co-creator, Craig Thomas opened up about how he and team worked on making the sitcom different and avoiding comparisons with the ’90s hit comedy Friends.
“A lot of shows before us had tried to replicate Friends, and not succeeded. So, there was a long trail of failed attempts to harness what Friends was,” he told People Magazine.
HIMYM premiered in 2005, a year after Friends came to its conclusion.
The screenwriter admitted that they “knew that the poster for the show was going to look like a Friends-esque show. We were nervous that it would seem like we were trying to be too much like Friends.”
To avoid failure and similarity with the show, Thomas shared that “we tried to differentiate ourselves immediately was just to show that we had this different storytelling structure.”
He continued, “We would play with time, we would play with narrative, we would play with flashbacks and flash forwards.”
Thomas hoped viewers would notice the change in storytelling style from the pilot episode. Regardless of whether they liked the series, he believed they wouldn’t compare it with Friends.
The show storyline revolved around Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel) and Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan) in the present day.
Meanwhile, Bob Saget provided the voice of an older Ted, who narrated the story to his teenage children, recounting how he met their mother 30 years earlier.