List of How I Met Your Mother characters
The main characters are: Ted Mosby, a romantic searching for "The One"; Barney Stinson, a womanizer; Robin Scherbatsky, a journalist who moved to New York in 2005; and Marshall Eriksen and Lily Aldrin, a long-term couple. Although the show is based around The Mother, her first appearance is not until the season eight finale.
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.