If you've ever used the phrase "legen -- wait for it -- dary" in conversation, it was probably Craig Thomas' fault. Along with Carter Bays, Thomas has created the hip and charming ensemble comedy How I Met Your Mother and given the world such wonderful things as Robin Sparkles, Barney and the Slutty Pumpkin... just to name a few. The show recently kicked off its fourth season, and while there's no Britney drawing in big attention right now, there's plenty of other great stuff happening. We sat down right before the second episode aired, to talk to the enthusiastic Thomas about the show, his favorite catchphrases and we were pleasantly surprised that the to find out that he's a big fan of ours as well.
TWoP: Hi! Thanks for taking time out today.
Craig Thomas: No problem. I really like your site.
TWoP: Wow. Thanks so much.
CT: I've been a fan of it for a long time as a huge TV dork. I think I used to go on there for, among other things, Buffy, Angel, and maybe a little Veronica Mars. I definitely have looked at threads of multiple shows I dorked out on on your site, so when you guys added the forums for How I Met Your Mother it felt like a big accomplishment. We're fans ever since. It's a place where people go and have honest discussions, and they'll give the show shit if they don't like it and stuff but it's kind of thrilling if you go on there and see if people liked it, 'cause no one is pulling any punches on there. So it's cool, and I liked that.
TWoP: Do fan reactions play into how you write the show at all? Are you like "Oh god, the people online hate this"?
CT: Well, of course you want everybody to like it. I don't read it all the time, but it's nice to go on there and see how much continuity matters to people within the universe of a show. That's absolutely true for me, too. Whenever there's the slightest inconsistency in a Buffy episode or Friends or something, my wife and I would sit on the couch and throw stuff at the TV. Even when you watched Cheers and you'd see Frasier talking about how his dad passed away... it's such a bummer. Obviously, you can't fault Frasier for that, 'cause they didn't know what they were going to do [with a spinoff]. But the fact that people really care about that stuff, and want the universe to be coherent and consistent, I find that that's something I take away from reading the forums of TV Without Pity. When we're doing stuff in the writers room, I really try and remember that.
TWoP: You must have a huge wall of connections and stories because there are so many things that you jump forward and back to?
CT: There's a lot of things. The good thing is that we've maintained a lot of the same staff for all four seasons among our writer's assistants and our writers. We have a good core group of people that have been there the whole time, so there's a good safety net for remembering what we said in episode 18. And now we're in episode 73 or whatever, and it's tracking those things. That stuff really matters to me as a fan, and whenever you do TV Without Pity it definitely reminds me of that. Every now and again there's something where we're blurring it a little bit. But we always try to make sure it makes sense.
TWoP: Yeah. Fans noticed when Barney was driving to escape someone, and before he wasn't able to drive.
CT: Yeah we talked about that a little bit. [Laughs.] That was one of those things where we kind of could explain it if we had ten minutes in court. Like, "No, 'cause in that episode he didn't, but then he worked on it, and then he could..." Ultimately it seemed a little fishy.
TWoP: We'll let that slide.
CT: Thank you very much.
TWoP: If you forget how many slaps there are going on in the slap bet, then there's going to be trouble.
CT: There's definitely people keeping count at home on that one... which is nice. It's just good to see people so involved. If they go to your site and complain about stuff, either continuity things or something they didn't think the character would do... When people get worked up and irate about it, it's actually kind of good, because it makes you realize they're invested in the show. Not that I want to piss people off. But when I read stuff and see that someone has a point, I take that into account in the writing. That person actually raised a point that I thought, too. Or maybe it's never occurred to me, but that's a good point, we should watch for that.
TWoP: It's not a passive show, like a procedural show where it's not that big of a deal.
CT: It does become kind of interactive. The internet has changed it so much. This is a way to get inside viewers' heads a little bit and see what they're thinking and what they're caring about. At times it can be painful. You know you have to put a disclaimer on it, and you realize everyone has an opinion and it can be different from your opinion. But it's cool. It's funny how worked-up people get. But then again, if it's a show I love and it suddenly starts sucking or making weird decisions, I get so pissed off. I am such a huge Buffy and Angel fan, but they had this thing [on Angel] where Angel's son comes back. Remember this?
TWoP: Yes!
CT: And he starts hooking up with Cordelia. That was like throw-hot-beverages-at-the-TV-screen level of discomfort. My wife and I were so upset.
TWoP: I held it against that poor actor. I had such a hard time watching Mad Men because of it.
CT: I know. Totally! It was hard to get over it. It's so funny. That's exactly how we feel. He's good on Mad Men, and it's not creepy or incestuous or weird. He's doing a good job. But there's that little part of you that's like, "Damn... that was a rough ride that we all went through on that show."
TWoP: Are you having fun being back this season?
CT: It's really fun. It was a really shortened hiatus, 'cause we went so late because of the strike. At first, we came back and it was like, "Oh my God, we just climbed Mt. Everest, and now we're just doing it again because we just did nine episodes in ten weeks with no scripts at all." We just had to bust it. It was the hardest I've ever worked in my life. It was just insane, but ultimately we discovered we're kind of good that way. We kind of do maybe better work when we're completely screwed.
TWoP: That second half of the season was amazing. The episodes were some of my favorites and really crazy funny.
CT: Thank you so much. We're really proud of it. Not only should it not have been any good, it should have made no sense. It could have just been a weird descent into madness, because we had no time to do any of it. But ultimately, it came out well. So when we first started back up, it was like, "Oh my God, how do we go back and do this again?" But then you're right back in. And when you're writing a show, you're also kind of a fan of that show hopefully, and it's nice to start spending time with these characters again. I kind of wanted to see what would happen. You start writing and getting creative and playful and letting these characters show you where they are going. It's a pretty fun feeling. With your writing staff, it's this shared hallucination in this real world you've created, a little bit. You care about these people. You want to see what's going to happen to them, and it's fun. You can write a show and be a fan of it at the same time. Which is a great thing.
TWoP: I liked the decision to make Barney go back to his womanizing ways. Because at first he and Robin made so much sense...
CT: They do. They make more sense than Ted and Robin in some ways.
TWoP: They really do. I thought it was nice. But the girls are part of what make him Barney.
CT: We didn't want to not have Barney be Barney, but it's nice along the way discovering dimensions to him. Discovering things about his past. What made him the way he is and knowing that there is part of him that's a great guy. He's just unequipped to pursue that part. And sort of unapologetically so. He's not going to sit there apologizing that he's not going to enhance the goodness buried deep within him. He's just like, "I'm Barney. This is what I do."
TWoP: Are you ever worried about making him too crazy over-the-top?
CT: Absolutely. We worry about it sometimes. We try and make sure within each season we know ways to deepen Barney or complicate him or just throw some little hint of something more into the character. I always think of him as kind of like a superhero. We did that story of how Barney became Barney, where he was a hippie and the yuppie suit guy stole his girl away from him. We very much envisioned that as a superhero origin story. Or like how Darth Vader became Darth Vader. I really like that idea that Barney has this mythology of all these layers and issues with his dad and issues with women. It makes it so much more fun to write, and it makes him not just a cartoon character. And when you have those episodes where he's just being over the top, you feel like you've earned them more.
I think we earned episode four, which I'm about to describe, by doing episode one. This is an absolutely insane, shallow aspect of Barney. We do a thing where Barney puts on really good old man makeup, goes up to a really attractive woman in the bar who looks like she might not be that bright and claims to be from the future. He says that he can't explain this, but she has to sleep with him tonight or mankind will meet its ultimate demise. And he says, "The younger version of me, the 2008 version of me, is going to come through that door in about five minutes. You have to sleep with him. He is the man who solves global warming. Just trust me. I can't explain all of it." And sure enough, he walks out and comes back a few minutes later as younger Barney, and the whole gang is sort of sitting there debating about whether this plan will work. I won't say whether it works or not. But you can do things like that if you feel that he's also sort of a human being. At the end of the day, in that episode Barney is hilarious in crazy old man makeup. And you know what? I'm fine with that. As long as you keep the balance, I think you can do both.
TWoP: So there's all this talk about the mother, and Sarah Chalke potentially being her because she and Ted are engaged. Are you trying to throw us off the scent with her?
CT: We always knew, if we got a multiple season, that we'd want to end a season on a proposal. I think a show called How I Met Your Mother can get away with that. And it's funny. To me, this is the best prospect for the mother that we've seen and Sarah Chalke is so great. She and Josh are so great together that it's taken a different course than we thought it would when we first wrote it in the back nine last season. So we'll be seeing more of her than we even planned because of how great she is. Whether or not she's the mom, I don't want to say. But we're definitely going to go further with this relationship than we ever have with one for Ted before. You could do a lot worse than Sarah Chalke for the mom.
TWoP: I love Sarah on the show. She's fun.
CT: She's really great. We're definitely keeping the mystery alive and not saying either way. And I will say that, in writing it, it's gone a different way than I thought it would.
TWoP: I'm still holding out for the Slutty Pumpkin...
CT: That's the great thing about How I Met Your Mother. It's like a bad horror movie. No one ever dies. There's no dead ends. The door is always open. The person could come back to life. I will say this. There are long discussions in the writers room about the Slutty Pumpkin, and how that will factor into the mythology -- we definitely talk about that every season actually.
TWoP: That's probably the episode I've watched the most.
CT: Is that right?
TWoP: Yeah. Maybe the Robin Sparkles one is close. But the Slutty Pumpkin is the one that I watch when I'm having a down day.
CT: I love Ted in that one. That was such an early episode. You sort of love this poor guy standing up on a roof, you know... just hoping that he'll have this magical moment again with this woman, in such an optimistic Lloyd Dobler-ly kind of way. We're just rooting for that guy. So we definitely think the Slutty Pumpkin is alive in the mythology. You may not have seen the last of her.
TWoP: Are Marshall and Lily moving to Slantytown soon?
CT: They won't move to Slantytown right away. The back story is they've been trying to fix Slantytown and make it normal sea level town, and sort of make that apartment ready to move into. We'll see more about that, and we will move into that apartment, which creates the directions you'll see. The dynamics we get into, with different people moving around... I will say this: By Episodes 4, 5 and 6, really big changes happen in the characters' lives, and there's a lot of surprising... I'm trying to think of how to say it without giving it away... There are just a lot big events and shifts and moves going on in the character's lives all at once as we head into November sweeps after Episodes 4, 5 and 6. It was fun to write and we're just finishing shooting that arc now. It's always easier to write an episode when there's big stuff going on in the characters' lives. It just adds a weight and a reason when you're telling this story. So we had a lot of fun writing this first batch of six/seven episodes, 'cause there was just so much going on. And we packed so much into these first six. I don't think we've ever packed more big events into six episodes than these first six. The first was almost daunting to do in a little 20-minute story. But I think the new episodes are great. I think they're really fun and super information-dense. I think the fans will really like it. There's a lot happening.
TWoP: You're making me nervous with talk of "change," because I love Marshall/Lily. They are the stablish people.
CT: Don't worry -- I love them, too. They're based on me and my wife a little bit. They'll be fine.
TWoP: Any fun guest stars coming up?
CT: We just had Regis Philbin in our second episode. He played a really crazy and possibly violent version of himself. It plays upon his fervent energy bubbling under the surface of Regis Philbin a little bit. It puts a little twist on it. We had him play very strong and very crazy. Almost superhumanly strong. The joke in the Regis Philbin episode is maybe the strangest and most unrealistic joke we've ever done on the show. And it doesn't have the narrator saying "maybe that's how it happened." It's just "By the way... this happened." So maybe one of the oddest jokes of all time in the Regis episode. At least in my mind. But I love it. It's my favorite joke in that episode. What else? Jason Jones from The Daily Show is going to be in episodes five and six. Kind of a little mini-arc. He play's Sarah Chalke's -- Stella's -- ex-husband. ...Or not ex-husband, because they never got married. The father of her child.
TWoP: Baby daddy.
CT: Baby daddy. Thank you.
TWoP: That's the technical term.
CT: That's the technical term I was groping for. [Laughs.] He's great. We're all such huge fans of The Daily Show that he showed up and we all just dorked out and tried to thank him for saving our sanity in this election year. Him and the rest of the Daily Show guys. So he's really funny. Sarah is in a whole bunch of these and possibly more to come. That's kind of it. Those are the big three, Regis, Sarah, and Jason as of right now.
TWoP: That's fine. There doesn't have to be a million guest stars.
CT: I know. We were a little guest-star crazy last year, but I'm thrilled that in our first six we have Regis and Jason Jones. They both add a lot to their episodes.
TWoP: This show has so many great phrases and catchphrases. Is there one you particularly love, or you're really happy because it has worked into everyday lingo?
CT: I'm always thrilled around here when I hear somebody say one of those. Or if I'm somewhere with Neil and somebody random just calls out "legen-dary" or "suit up!" It's kind of the creative moment I want to bottle and take home for later, 'cause it's cool. When we were writing those kind of things early in the series, we're not thinking, "Oh, we're creating catchphrases." Early on in the series, we were just trying to find distinctive ways these characters speak and find out who they are. And that's all it is. We're not trying to consciously create that kind of stuff. But the fact that it catches on for people, like how Barney speaks, or how this whole group of people relates to each other, that's great. One thing I hear a lot from people is that it's how their friends are when they hang out -- that this is how they joke around and relate. And that's great, 'cause that's what we're trying to write. What we've been trying to write since the pilot. That's how we are. That's how Carter and I are when we hang out or with our friends or with my wife. That's sort of how we all talk. But in terms of my favorites, I love the twists on things. I love getting to things like "birthday suit up" or "penguin suit up." I really love those weird mutations that come out of it. One of my favorite jokes that I didn't pitch was -- Chris Miller, one of our very funny Season 1 writers, pitched the one that was the "lactose intolerant" iteration of the "legendary" form. That was one of my all-time favorites, for sure. Then there are the little sleeper-hit ones that people don't say, and it wouldn't come up when you say "What are the How I Met Your Mother catchphrases," but I like when Marshall makes a point and he says "lawyered."
TWoP: Lawyered! Yes!
CT: I always enjoy that, 'cause Jason Segel is just so funny and charming, and I like when he lands good points and he's lawyered you. That's definitely one of my favorite ones.
TWoP: Cool. So The thing I always wonder is that, ostensibly future Ted is telling this story to his kids. Do you ever think maybe there is some stuff you wouldn't want to tell your kids?
CT: Ha. The amount of inappropriate crap we do on the show that ostensibly a dad is telling the kids on the show is downright irresponsible, and we may be making America a worse place week by week. But we try at times to highlight to the audience that not every word of this is happening. For starters, the dad is telling this story over the course of one afternoon. You know, the kids don't change clothes or anything, and they're not getting older. That fact alone hopefully says to people he's probably condensing, this narrator. He's probably glazing over certain details. Leaving certain things out. Every once and a while we have Bob Saget say something like, "I'm going to skip over this, kids," stuff like that. And "There's no way I'm telling you this part. Let's just skip it." Or "let's fast-forward through this." So even the whole episode where Ted may or may not have had a three-way, in the opening narration he says, "I'm telling you a lot of stories, kids, but this is one I would never tell you." We, the audience, still see the story anyway, but that was one where we said, "We have to put some disclaimer on this, so we're not actively sought-after and persecuted by various wholesome family groups in the country."
TWoP: Right. Though he could be the most awesome dad ever.
CT: Look, the kids are teenagers. I like to think that in his mind he's telling them the cleaned-up version. He's telling them a story about dating and breakups and drinking too much one night. Sort of as a way to teach them what not to do. A little bit of a cautionary tale there.
TWoP: So anything else exciting that I should know?
CT: What else? I'm trying to think ahead to the few. I'm so nervous about spoilers. I'm the worst at saying what's coming up, 'cause I always say too much. I'm really bad with it and I may just leave it at that for now. I think I've haven't given away too much hopefully. But I probably still did.
TWoP: Basically: new season, lots of fun?
CT: It's great. It's great to have a strong debut, ratings-wise. And we have six episodes shot now, and we'll embark upon seven, eight, nine in a week or so and I love all of them. I think they're coming out great. I think you do get better as you go. It's good to have longevity. It's good to get to Season 4. You start knowing how to do this job better. Everybody. The actors. Our director. The writers. You just build up these muscles and figure it out. And it's a lot of fun. We're having a lot of fun right now.
TWoP: And you're going into syndication...
CT: Our initial round of syndication sales has gone really well. Selling to the big markets that you start with. It takes months and months to sell to all the markets, and we'll just keep our fingers crossed for the rest of the process. But Lifetime picked up the show for cable rights. So it's great to put a show out there as a product and see that there is a strong desire for it. We're so proud of the show. We're thrilled that it will live on in other forms.
TWoP: Are you thinking ahead to Season 5? Or do you not want to get that far ahead yet?
CT: We're always thinking ahead. We shot something for our series finale in year two. We've had a little piece of footage that we shot literally in our first week of season two that is in a vault and we intent to use as part of the ending of the series. So we are always thinking ahead or planning ahead; we know certain markers along the way we want to hit. Along the way you also find stuff. We definitely are securing the ship to a specific point in the horizon.
TWoP: Great. I'm enjoying the ride.
CT: Thank you. I'm really grateful that you watch the show. I appreciate it.
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