List of awards and nominations received by How I Met Your Mother
"How I Met Your Mother" (often abbreviated to "HIMYM") is an American sitcom that premiered on CBS on September 19, 2005. The 2013–14 season is the show's ninth and final season. The series follows the main character, Ted Mosby, and his group of friends in Manhattan. As a framing device, Ted, in the year 2030, recounts to his son and daughter the events that led him to meeting their mother.
How I Met Your Mother
"How I Met Your Mother" was inspired by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas' idea to "write about our friends and the stupid stuff we did in New York", where they previously worked as writers for "Late Show with David Letterman", among others. The two drew from their friendship in creating the characters. Ted is based loosely on Bays, and Marshall and Lily are based loosely on Thomas and his wife. Thomas' wife Rebecca was initially reluctant to have a character based on her but agreed if they could get Alyson Hannigan to play her. Hannigan was looking to do more comedy work and was available. Josh Radnor and Jason Segel, who were cast as Ted and Marshall, respectively, were not well known, though Segel had been a cast member on the short-lived "Freaks and Geeks" and a recurring guest star on Judd Apatow's follow-up show, "Undeclared". The role of Barney was initially envisioned as a "John Belushi-type character" before Neil Patrick Harris won the role after being invited to an audition by the show's casting director Megan Branman. Pamela Fryman invited Bob Saget to be the voiceover narrator, Future Ted, explaining to him that the show would be like "The Wonder Years" but "kind of into the future". Saget either went to the television studio and recorded the narration while watching the episode, or did so separately and rerecorded with the episode if necessary. He normally did not attend table readings but did so for the last episode.