With the US networks announcing their new season lineups, including the 2014 crop of new shows that will be hitting the air, scores of pilots for shows that will never go to air are also, sadly, getting news that it’s not to be. When CBS announced their lineup, a curious omission was the much-talked about spinoff to the dearly departed How I Met Your Mother, the creatively titled How I Met Your Dad. It would appear that the show does not have a future, at least not on CBS.
The network has passed on the pilot for the moment, meaning that, based on the strength of the pilot produced by show creators Carter Bays, Craig Thomas, and Emily Spivey, a full series will not be ordered by CBS. There are suggestions that the network asked for the pilot to be re-tooled – which is not an unusual move, given that they made the same request of The Big Bang Theory a few years back – but the show’s parent studio 20th Century Fox is reportedly unwilling to do so without a series commitment as well; the television industry equivalent of being asked to go back and tidy your room properly but refusing to do so without guaranteed ice cream afterwards.
The show is not completely dead just yet. Fox will reportedly be shopping the show around to other networks and is very confident of it being picked up, particularly given the show’s pedigree and the success of the original from whence it came.
How I Met Your Dad is a show in the same tone as How I Met Your Mother, and centres on a new set of New York friends who meet at a bar whilst a middle-aged Mother 20 years in the future recounts to her children stories of the romantic escapades in her youth before she was tied down with a husband and kids and such. It is set to star Greta Gerwig, Drew Tarver, Tiya Sircar, Nick D’Agosto and Andrew Santino.
Photo: Jason Merritt via Getty Images.
via Deadline.
