Hilary Duff Will Star In A “How I Met Your Father” Series

Tragedy struck last year when Hilary Duff revealed that the Lizzie McGuire reboot was officially dead because Disney+ wouldn’t let her grown-up Lizzie be grown (they wanted a more family-friendly show, whereas Hilary wanted an “honest, authentic” adult version of her character). Hilary begged Hulu to pick up the Lizzie reboot, but they didn’t. But only Hilary’s grown-up Lizzie McGuire dreams died. Hilary and Hulu found a project to do together, and that’s an upcoming sequel to the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother called How I Met Your Father.

You’re not having déjà vu. HIMYM ran from 2005 to 2014, and in 2013, it was announced that the show’s executive producers were working on a spin-off called How I Met Your Dad, which was just a gender-flipped version of the original show, starring Greta Gerwig as the main character who tells the story of how she met her kids’ dad (with the voice-over narration being done by Meg Ryan). They shot a pilot, which CBS didn’t pick up to series, and that was that. Two years after HIMYM’s series finale, there were talks that This Is Us executive producers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger were working on a sequel called How I Met Your Father. And five years after those rumors of a sequel first popped up, we have confirmation, via Entertainment Weekly, that the show is a go, and it will star Hilary Duff as the mother who spends several seasons revealing how she met her kid’s father. Hilary is also a producer on the series. via EW:

Hulu announced Wednesday that they had given a 10-episode series order to How I Met Your Father, the long-awaited sequel series to How I Met Your Mother, and cast Hilary Duff (Younger) in the lead role.

The premise should sound familiar enough: Set in the near future, the show will follow Sophie (Duff) telling her son the story of how she met his father back in the year 2021, when Sophie and her close-knit group of friends were figuring out who they are, what they want out of life, and how to fall in love in the age of dating apps and limitless options.

How I Met Your Mother creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas will return to executive produce the sequel, which means Father will probably be a whole lot like Mother, which is either good news or bad news, depending on your tolerance for the phrase “legen – wait for it – dary.”

The original series took nine seasons to finally reveal who the mother was (to the disappointment of roughly 100% of the people who watched that show). But it was possible to draw out the reveal over nine seasons. Based on the premise given in Hulu’s press release, I have no idea how they could possibly make How I Met Your Father last longer than 9 minutes. Hilary’s character will say, “Gather round, son, and let me tell you the story of how I met your father. The year was 2021…“. And her son will respond, “2021? Let me guess. You met him in a socially-distanced lineup to buy toilet paper and masks at CVS. You hooked up with him after seeing he was vaxxed in his Tinder bio. Or he was delivering Uber Eats to you. Which one was it?”

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