Warning: Contains SPOILERS for How I Met Your Father season 1
Although How I Met Your Father’s Drew plotline was reminiscent of many How I Met Your Mother episodes, the way the show handled the story proves its protagonists are very different. How I Met Your Father will inevitably struggle to escape the shadow of its predecessor. Like The Conners rebooting Roseanne without the title character, How I Met Your Father’s attempts to recapture the tone of How I Met Your Mother with a new cast and updated setting inevitably invites comparison with the earlier hit sitcom.
However, at least one of How I Met Your Father's early plotlines saw the show invite this comparison before then using it to underline the difference between the two show's protagonists. When How I Met Your Father’s heroine Sophie started dating Josh Peck’s charismatic Drew, the character was immediately charmed by how sophisticated, grown-up, and altogether mature her new love interest appeared. However, How I Met Your Father’s approach to this story flew in the face of its predecessor’s premise.
Early in How I Met Your Father’s “Dirrty Thirty” (season 1 episode 4), the show appeared to repeat How I Met Your Mother’s approach when the sitcom set up this storyline. The idea that Sophie is attracted to Drew’s maturity and wants to impress him with her own sophistication, thus leading her to hide the more ribald aspects of her personality and ruin her 30th birthday part in the process, is a story that How I Met Your Mother would have given Ted or Robin in its early seasons. However, the eventual punchline (that Drew prefers Sophie’s authentic spontaneity to her attempts at snobbery) proves the series does diverge from How I Met Your Mother where it matters, as Sophie's more playful personality is far removed from the occasionally stiff and hard to connect with Ted Mosby.
One of the most common criticisms of How I Met Your Mother’s early seasons was that Ted being obsessed with marriage was an odd and unrelatable trait for a single twentysomething. Classic How I Met Your Mother episodes like “The Slutty Pumpkin” revolved around Ted’s search for “the One” and his conviction that he would settle down as soon as he found this elusive partner, something that didn’t ring true for many viewers given his relative youth. In contrast, Sophie’s more free-spirited approach to life and dating makes the spinoff feels less derivative of its predecessor.
How I Met Your Father has had a hard time convincing viewers that it is more than an updated iteration of How I Met Your Mother, with early reviews of the show calling it a pale imitation of the earlier hit. As such, Drew’s insistence that he likes Sophie’s youthful exuberance helps the show underline the differences between its heroine and Ted. Sophie doesn’t seem to be in any rush to make life-long commitments or settle down despite her attempts at maturity, making her a very different lead from How I Met Your Mother’s divisive hero Ted. As a result of Ted and Sophie’s fundamentally divergent worldviews, How I Met Your Father can continue to borrow parts of its formula from How I Met Your Mother while still maintaining an identity of its own.
Episodes of How I Met Your Father air Tuesdays on Hulu