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HIMYF Just Avoided Recreating One of HIMYM’s Best Loved Locations

Although How I Met Your Father has borrowed a lot from How I Met Your Mother, the spinoff made the smart decision to avoid borrowing one iconic location. How I Met Your Mother featured plenty of memorable catchphrases, running jokes, and memorable locations throughout the show’s nine-season run. As such, some fans were excited when How I Met Your Father debuted in 2022 and continued the sitcom franchise.

While many fans of the show want to see How I Met Your Father reference its predecessor regularly, the series still needs to carve out a distinct identity of its own. To avoid How I Met Your Mother’s mistakes, the show will need to avoid over-reliance on running gags. As such, How I Met Your Father’s decision to avoid re-using one of the earlier show’s best-remembered locations was an admirable choice.

Related: HIMYF’s Drew Story Proves The Show Is No HIMYM Clone

Throughout How I Met Your Mother’s first few seasons when the show’s group of mismatched friends were still twenty-somethings, the show set many of its big party scenes on the rooftop of Ted and Marshall’s apartment building. There, the friends hosted idyllic parties that utilized the location’s romantic potential and its size for maximum benefit. How I Met Your Father featured a scene set on Sophie’s apartment rooftop in “Dirrty Thirty” (season 1, episode 5), but when Drew asked why Sophie didn’t have her 30th birthday party up there, she noted that her neighbor’s beehives made it impossible. After many iconic How I Met Your Mother episodes like the Halloween special 'The Slutty Pumpkin' used the setting for their action, it was a canny choice for How I Met Your Father to avoid stealing the set.

The revelation that bees inhabited Sophie’s rooftop was a nice excuse to use the location for a romantic one-on-one moment (like How I Met Your Mother often did) without outright stealing the set and recreating its use verbatim. How I Met Your Father is still just starting as a sitcom and needs to distinguish itself from How I Met Your Mother to regain the earlier show’s audience, meaning too many egregious borrows would leave the new spinoff feeling like a pale imitation of the earlier hit. Fortunately, the fact that Sophie’s party did not take place on her building's rooftop was not the only place where this How I Met Your Father episode diverged from the earlier show’s formula.

Where How I Met Your Mother’s divisive hero Ted was obsessed with finding 'the one' ever since the series began, Sophie has already proven that she is not as interested in settling down just yet. Her attempts to impress Drew with her maturity—and her eventual acceptance that she enjoys being young and free, rather than mature and measured—underlined the essential differences between Hilary Duff’s heroine and Josh Radnor’s Ted. Details like this and the choice to eschew the opportunity for a nostalgic rooftop party sequence ensure that How I Met Your Father feels less like a How I Met Your Mother clone with each outing, and more like a legitimate successor series.

More: HIMYM: Everything That Was Supposed to Happen in 2020



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