It’s hard for How I Met Your Father to recreate How I Met Your Mother’s appeal while establishing its own identity, but a 20-episode season 2 order should help the show recapture its predecessor’s knack for pacing. It is never easy for a spinoff to reinvent the universe of an earlier show while still feeling like its own beast. Even The Conners retconned Roseanne, despite the spinoff being a critical hit, proving that no amount of praise and rating success can stop a follow-up show from feeling creatively indebted to its predecessor.
With this in mind, How I Met Your Father season 1 has thus far done an impressive job of not becoming a shameless How I Met Your Mother clone. The series, which follows Hilary Duff’s Sophie as her older self narrates the titular story, borrows a lot from the earlier hit. From its broad, laugh-track-backed tone to the show’s flashback-focused structure, there’s no obfuscating the fact that How I Met Your Father is an extension of the How I Met Your Mother brand.
However, one early episode underlined the difference between Duff’s Sophie and the earlier show’s lead Ted, proving that How I Met Your Father is no clone of How I Met Your Mother in the process. Now, the fact that How I Met Your Father season 2 received a 20-episode order will allow the show to borrow some of its predecessor’s narrative structure while still maintaining an identity of its own. Unlike How I Met Your Father season 1’s truncated 10-episode run (which is normal for a streaming series), season 2 will run for a more leisurely 20 episodes, more akin to a traditional television comedy season.
This should allow the creators of How I Met Your Father to structure the series more like a classic sitcom and, more specifically, to ape the storytelling structure used by How I Met Your Mother. Since How I Met Your Father resisted the urge to steal one of How I Met Your Mother’s most iconic locations, borrowing the show’s approach to pacing isn't an unfair compromise for the new series. Since the series told an overarching, pre-planned story while also following conventional sitcom logic (where the status quo was usually maintained week-to-week), most seasons of How I Met Your Mother saw Ted pursue another new love interest who may or may not have been the titular mother.
This allowed the show to tell twenty (or so) short episode-length stories while also dropping in hints about whether or not Ted’s serialized romances with Victoria, Robin, Zoey, or another girl of the season would last. While the final season strayed from this setup, that season was also home to some of How I Met Your Mother’s worst-received episodes, a problem that came about largely because the show abandoned this successful structure in favor of a more experimental approach. Now, How I Met Your Father’s 20-episode season 2 can let the show explore a new love interest each season while still telling standalone stories with each episode, recapturing the pacing that let How I Met Your Mother’s best seasons work as both comedy and drama.