Photo: Patrick Wymore/Hulu
This post has spoilers from the season 2 premiere ofHow I Met Your Father.
Suit up! Barney is back and it’slegendary.
Neil Patrick Harris’beloved character was introduced in the original CBS seriesHow I Met Your Motherabout a hopeless romantic telling his children the long-winded love story about their mother while navigating adulthood in N.Y.C with his four best friends, including Harris' Barney Stinson, a confident player with catchy one-liners. The cast also includedJosh Radnor,Jason Segel,Alyson HanniganandCobie Smulders, with narration from late actorBob Saget.
Harris, 49, reprised his role ina surprise appearancein the season 2 premiere of Hulu spin-offHow I Met Your FatherTuesday.
Patrick Wymore/Hulu
This is only the beginning of Harris' introduction to the show, however, as creators Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger say audiences will beseeing more of him as season 2 continues.
“Whenever we talk about bringing back a member of the original crew, you want it to serve two purposes: You want to give some tidbits about what is going on in their lives, where they’ve landed and where they’re at,” Aptaker told the news outlet. “But it’s also about how they impact theHow I Met Your Fatherstory, and how they send one of our characters in a new, unexpected direction. Similar to Robin last year, we’ll learn some more about where Barney’s at, but it’ll also have a major impact on the trajectory, and main narrative, of our season.”
HIMYMleft Barney divorced fromRobin Scherbatsky(Smulders) and a dad to Ellie. While some fans have speculated that Barney could be Sophie’s mysterious father, the creators shut this rumor down, as the age difference wouldn’t have added up with the original plot line.
Though Harris was happy to follow suit of Smulders — who reprised the role of Robin in the first season ofHIMYF— he and the creators first had Zoom discussions on how to bring back Barney in a way that would be authentic to the character but also appropriate in the #MeToo era. (His character previously drew criticism forhis problematic dealings with women.)
“We wanted to bring him back, and we wanted him to be true to his character and to the fans that loved Barney so much,” Berger said in the interview. “But we also wanted him to exist on our show, in our time, in a way that made sense, so all of that Zoom was spent talking about how we could blend all those things and service him and the show in the best way possible.”
While it has yet to be revealed how many of the season’s 20 episodes Barney will appear in, the creators promise that people will be “pleasantly surprised” with how Sophie and Barney’s storyline will end up intertwining.
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New episodes ofHow I Met Your Fatherair Tuesdays on Hulu.
source: people.com
