The dating game in New York has changed since the creators of “How I Met Your Father” lived in the city in the mid-2000s, but it’s still all about that “epic love story” everyone wants to eventually share.
Described as a sequel to the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” “How I Met Your Father” takes the same premise and updates it for 2022: photographer Sophie (Hilary Duff), surrounded by a group of friends, flounders her way through the Manhattan dating pool in a desperate attempt to find love, while her older self (Kim Cattrall) narrates the story to her adult off-screen son.
“How I Met Your Father,” which premiered Tuesday on Hulu, keeps “the nostalgia and the grand epic love story it takes on when it’s someone looking back and telling their kids how they wound up a person, basically,” showrunner Isaac Aptaker told the Daily News.
Aptaker co-created the show with Elizabeth Berger, his creative partner from NBC’s drama series “This Is Us,” but the two date back to their college years at NYU and after, when they shared a sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village. They know what it’s like to date in New York, they said — but not in 2022, when dating apps like Tinder and Hinge have changed the game.
“Online, we’re trying to portray this image of ourselves to other people that we hope they like and then when we meet them in real life, do we have to pretend to be that person we were on our dating profiles? Or from the start should we just be genuine and honest?” said Tom Ainsley, who plays Charlie, the new love interest for Sophie’s best friend Valentina (Francia Raisa).
“The answer is obvious — we should definitely be genuine and honest — but some of us have been trying that tact for 30 years now and it’s not been working.”
The sequel is littered with callbacks to its predecessor, from set decoration to a game between the characters about finding Jason Momoa lookalikes, but the cast and creators wanted to create a standalone show.
Unlike the original sitcom, which joined a long-standing group already in progress, “How I Met Your Father” introduces its pals as they go along. Sophie inducts her Uber driver Jesse (Chris Lowell), who recently went viral when his girlfriend mercilessly rejected his marriage proposal; Jesse brings in his newly engaged best friend Sid (Suraj Sharma) and his adopted sister Ellen (Tien Tran) who just divorced her wife and moved to New York, while Valentina brings along Charlie, her new rich British boyfriend.
While the show exists to get Sophie a boyfriend, her band of misfit friends fserve as a reminder that there’s more to life than dating.
“We were also really interested in this journey of self-discovery that Sophie goes on,” Berger said. “Part of ending up with your person involves coming to terms with yourself and your history and your identity. A lot of that has to be figured out before you can end up with your person.”
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