One’s enjoyment of How I Met Your Father, Hulu’s 10-episode standalone sequel of the popular sitcom How I Met Your Mother, will mostly depend on nostalgia for the original. I don’t have much of it for How I Met Your Mother (often styled HIMYM), a successor to Friends about a group of white twentysomethings, then thirtysomethings, living and dating in Manhattan which ran on CBS from 2005 until 2014. Everyone has their taste in TV comfort food (I just inhaled Emily in Paris) but HIMYM and its hopeless romanticism was too corny for me, too sweet.
Its central conceit, of a middle-aged Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor, with the late Bob Saget as narrator) telling his children the story of meeting their mother in the most convoluted way possible, might have started out fresh. But by the early 2010s it felt overdone, even for a multi-camera network sitcom with a laugh track.
