And now, a word (or 42) from How I Met Your Mother cocreator Craig Thomas on the week's biggest TV headline, Britney Spears' upcoming visit to the CBS sitcom. "We're thrilled to have Britney Spears on the show," Thomas raves. "Britney is an exciting new talent and we can't wait for the world to meet her. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go check out this 'Internet' thing everyone's talking about."Before Thomas stole away to the nearest Atari 800 and dial-up modem, however, he also weighed in on the casting of Scrubs' cutie Sarah Chalke as Ted's dermy doc, Stella. "We couldn't be happier to have Sarah Chalke joining us," he says. "Not only is Sarah smart, funny and charming, but we already know she looks damn good in a labcoat." True dat!So, what's your latest thinking? Too much ado about guest-casting? Or is the Britney-Sarah tag team just the buzz-builder the show needs to climb off the renewal bubble once and for all?Use our Online Video Guide to meet up with some Mother clips.R...
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If my writing partner, Carter Bays, and I hadn't missed New York City so much, we probably never would have created How I Met Your Mother (Mondays, 8 pm/ET, CBS). We wrote the pilot script a couple of years after moving out to Los Angeles, fueled by a near-fatal case of East Coast nostalgia. Like so many writers without a really good idea, we decided to write about ourselves. When CBS greenlit the show, we swore we'd remain true to reality, right down to the awesomely crappy apartment we shared on 75th and Amsterdam, with its tiny converted hallway of a kitchen. Our first meeting with the set designer went like this:
Us: These characters can't afford a huge place like on Friends. This apartment should be much, much smaller than what you usually see on TV.Set designer: Yeah, that won't work. It has to be big enough so
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So we're all on the New York street on the CBS Radford lot in Studio City shooting a How I Met Your Mother promo that's a parody of CSI, which they tell me is a popular show. We're all exhausted and not quite sure what we're doing. My sense is that on an hourlong procedural show, the hours are much worse but your face never has to change its expression. So that's a big up. Changing facial expressions is exhausting and overrated. They're setting up a shot of a corpse's feet right now. We're all pretty exhausted — the night's supposed to go very late and we have an early call. We haven't been officially picked up for a third season yet, but we're all seeing it as a good sign that CBS is having us do this. I'm going to have each cast member say something... get a little guest-blogging going.Me: Hey, guys. Give me a quote for my TVGuide.com blog.[Everybody thinks]Neil Patrick Harris: "I'm in a constant state of squint. And I like it. I like it a lot. It feels right, you know?"Alyso...
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