Hulu’s How I Met Your Father May Not Be Legendary, but It Has Its Charms

Kids, time is a funny thing.

It’s been less than 17 years since How I Met Your Mother premiered and only eight since it aired its series finale. But the beloved CBS comedy now seems like a relic of an era we are never likely to return to. The five main characters were all white and all straight. Unless you count Alyson Hannigan’s red hair, there was absolutely no diversity in the series. The world has changed a lot since September 19, 2005.

So in many ways, the pilot of Hulu’s How I Met Your Father feels a bit like a course correction. The cast is diverse both in ethnicity and sexual orientation. Hillary Duff stars as Sophie, a photographer who still believes in love despite all evidence to the contrary. She’s been, as she’s fond of repeating, on 87 Tinder dates and “all of them were duds.” She lives with her roommate Valentina (Francia Raisa) who has just returned from London with a new live-in boyfriend Charlie (Tom Ainsley). On her way to meet her latest Tinder date, Sophie meets Uber driver/music teacher Jesse (Christopher Lowell) and his best friend Sid (Suraj Sharma). She also meets Sid’s sister Ellen (Tien Tran), who is still reeling from her divorce from “the only other lesbian” in her hometown of Iowa. Already we are off to a better start reflecting the diversity of New York City—even if the New York City on the show looks like a faux set.

The notes for the series are very clear (insistent?) that How I Met Your Father is a sequel to the original series, not a reboot. (Fans may remember there was a 2014 How I Met Your Dad starring Greta Gerwig that never got past the pilot stage and was shelved indefinitely.) However producers and Hulu wants to spin it, the central conceit of the series is the same with a gender flip. The comedy, which also has Mother series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas as executive producers, flashes forward and backward in time to show the origins of a love story. While not the novel idea it was in 2005, it’s still a pretty terrific premise. The road to finding your partner is rarely a clear and straightforward path.

Which brings us to 2050, where future Sophie (Kim Cattrall) is regaling her son with the story of how she met his dad. “It’s time for me to tell you the unabridged version,” she tells him, while confessing she’s had enough wine to include “the sexy bits” in the story. Unlike the late Bob Saget, who was heard but not seen in the original series, Cattrall is one camera in a beautiful Nancy Meyer-esque living room talking to her off-screen son. It’s so great to be able to see Cattrall on camera in a series this January —even if it’s not in the series we were hoping for. (It is, however, fodder for some great And Just Like That/How I Met Your Father fan fiction.)

It’s also smart to age up the son, who appears to be in college, making a parent telling their child about the sexual exploits of their youth a little less unsettling. Also by making the son an offscreen character, the series doesn’t have to worry about him looking older in future seasons, which is key.