Greta Gerwig Cast As Lead In "How I Met Your Dad" – What This Means For The Spin-Off Series

Leah Zeffren ’17 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

Kids, this is the story of how How I Met Your Dad met its mother.
CBS’s new spinoff series has officially cast Greta Gerwig as the show’s leading role, Sally, a woman fresh out of a divorce in New York City. The show will follow Sally and her overeager, meddlesome friends who will try to impart their wisdom on her and all of the chaos that will ensue when said “wisdom” goes horribly awry. With each misadventure, Sally will carry on in what will probably be another tumultuous decade of hijinks and dating disasters in her search for dear ol’ Dad.
Gerwig’s Sally is described as “a female Peter Pan who has never grown up and has no idea where she’s going in life.” (Think her mumblecore character in Frances Ha meets prime-time television cast of fun-loving friends embarking on a series of legendary shenanigans and meta-flashbacks together.)
It’ll be fun to see the naturalistic dialogue of Greta’s loose, mumblecore acting roots mixed with the heavily mapped out, self-referential narrative structure of a How I Met Your Parent type of network series. Gerwig is also set to produce the show, along with writer-executive producers, Carter Bays, Craig Thomas, and Emily Spivey, and will also write for the show if the pilot gets picked up.
There are some who will of course groan at this news, already sick of the way How I Met Your Mother has dragged out over the years. In fact, some of them have only bothered to stick with it this far in order to cash in on a long overdue promise that was made to them back in 2005 when the show premiered.
And to them I say: you’re almost at the finish line, power through!
As for the rest of us who were capable of patiently enjoying it without the instant gratification of solving the title’s mystery—the few who will in fact be sad to see it go—we just hit the jackpot. Bring on another decade! Maybe as a little wink to the audience, Lori Loughlin can narrate the show as Sally, in keeping with the theme of randomly throwing out your voice into a Full House character as you age.
And who knows, maybe Ted and The Mother’s kid will even meet and marry Sally’s kid one day, and in 20 years from then one of them will take a decade to tell their kids how they met. Whatever happens, we’ll be watching!