Add “How I Met Your Mother” to the long list of 2000s-era sitcoms that are jumping aboard the podcast train. “How We Made Your Mother” will premiere on March 10 and will be hosted by series star Josh Radnor and co-creator Craig Thomas.
Produced by Alek Lev, the series will see the two “explore, episode by episode, the mystery at the heart of what has made this show so durable and beloved. It’s time — much like the older, wiser narrator Ted does in the show — to look back on this adventure that occupied a pivotal decade of their lives: how the show changed them, how it changed its fans and how it changed the culture,” a synopsis for the podcast reads.
The idea for the re-watch podcast came from Radnor’s wife Jordana Jacobs, who has never seen an episode of the nine-season CBS hit. “I think Josh was really happy to meet and fall in love with and marry somebody who didn’t come in with 208 episodes of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ memorized,” Thomas told People.
At some point, Jacobs told her husband, “‘I want to see this thing that you did for 10 years of your life,’” Thomas recalled. Thus, this latest pop culture podcast was born.
The podcast will be released ahead of the 20th anniversary of the show’s first episode, which debuted on Sept. 19, 2005. “There’s a lot of stuff baked into the podcast that parallels the ethos of the show, because Craig and I are approaching the age that older Ted was when he told this story to his kids. So it just felt like the right moment to look back,” Radnor added.
There’s another major reason why a “How I Met Your Mother” podcast should be an interesting one: Though the series was beloved during its time, it’s not one that has aged particularly well. Neil Patrick Harris’ womanizing Barney is often pointed to as a toxic character that emerged during this time period (though it could be argued that the show was laughing at and not with Barney’s rampant sexism).
Then there’s the finale … the last two-part episode, which shows the fate of Ted’s (Radnor) wife, is largely considered to be one of the worst television finales of all time. As fun as it may be to hear Radnor and Thomas break down the origin of “legend–wait for it–dary,” tackling those thornier topics will likely make this appointment listening for TV obsessives.
