CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother will end later this year, nearly a decade since those poor kids sat down to hear their dad's long, weirdly digressive story about a bunch of women he slept with before meeting the woman who eventually spawned them. This is the perfect time for How I Met Your Mother creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays to leverage their success to create the smart, daring sitcom of their dreams.
So what are they doing with all that freedom? Creating How I Met Your Dad, a spin-off series that repeats the exact same concept from a woman's perspective. How revolutionary.
We don't know much about How I Met Your Dad yet, though CBS has confirmed that it won't share characters or settings from How I Met Your Mother. Creator Carter Bays — who apparently uses a very loose definition of the word "original" — has described the new series as "its own magical original thing," so maybe the characters will be a bunch of wizards or something.
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But isn't there some idea out there that's more interesting? I think so, and I have a few pitches for CBS before they get too far into this How I Met Your Dad thing:
1. Ciao! I Left Your Mother
A glib Italian guy says goodbye to his kids as he embarks on a new life as a freewheeling single dude.
2. Cow, I Milked Your Mother
An old farmer tells a bunch of young calfs how he started running a small dairy farm.
3. How I Met Fox Mulder
Dana Scully talks about how she started investigating aliens and stuff. (Bonus: You could just screen old X-Files episodes and no one would notice.)
4. How I Melt Your Mother
The sun tells a bunch of baby snowmen about how their mom will slowly fade into nothingness when spring comes. Very sad.
5. Bluh! I Bit Your Mother
Dracula tells a bunch of kids about the time he turned their mother into a soulless vampy.
6. Pow, I Hit Bill Buckner
A diehard Red Sox fan recounts the time he punched out the former first baseman over his leg-end-ary error in the 1986 World Series.
7. Wow! It Is Not Butter?
Fabio improvises a series of rambling, 30-minute commercials for I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!®
8. Yawn… We Made Another
A couple of guys who started a popular sitcom try to explain why they're sticking to the same generic template instead of coming up with something remotely creative.
