Stream It Or Skip It: ‘How I Met Your Father’ Season 2 on Hulu Remains A Bummer Of A Spin-Off

How I Met Your Mother was a Friends-style sitcom with an enduring mystery fans had to earn the answer to over the course of it’s nine seasons on CBS – WHO WAS THE MOTHER GOING TO BE?? We watched and waited because the writing was clever and the cast was great, so it makes sense to want to repeat the formula. Hulu’s How I Met Your Father, now in its second season, is trying hard to do that, but it lacks the sharp scripts and beloved catchphrases of the original, and the cast of the new series lacks the chemistry that made the first show so special.

HOW I MET YOUR FATHER SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We open on the home of older Sophie, our narrator, in 2050. “Mom, where are you? If you don’t come back in three seconds, I’m going to hang up! Three! Two…” an off-camera voice yells. Sophie (Kim Cattrall) appears and says, “Calm down, I’m right here! God, you’re like, obsessed with my story,” she says in what can only be described as classic Kim Cattrall voice. The woman has perfected a dialect that is singular to her, whether she’s playing Sophie or Samantha Jones. Her delivery of this not funny line elicits guffaws from the laugh track, which in turn, elicits a groan from me.

The Gist: Season one of How I Met Your Father set up the dynamics of our core gang in 2022, starting with Sophie (Hilary Duff), a photographer who longs to be in a relationship and whose future self narrates the show to her son. Jesse (Chris Lowell) is an Uber driver and music teacher that Sophie has has feelings for, but Jesse introduced Sophie to Drew (Josh Peck) and they dated for a while before Sophie broke up with him at the end of season one. We also have Jesse’s sister Ellen (Tien Tran), who has relocated to New York to be closer to her brother, and then there’s Sid (Suraj Sharma) and Hannah (Ashley Reyes), who are engaged, and Valentina (Francia Raisa), Sophie’s best friend, and Charlie (Tom Ainsley), Valentina’s British boyfriend.

The season begins just moments after the last one left off, with Sophie finally having a gallery show for her photographs. All of her friends are there to support her, but in the last 48 hours, a lot has happened to each of them: Sid and Hannah eloped at City Hall, Valentina and Charlie broke up (but can’t keep their hands off each other), and Sophie slept with Jesse, who said I love you in his sleep. Not what she expected form him, and that’s really messing with her head. To complicate things even more, Ian (Daniel Augustin), the marine biologist that moved to Australia last season, has returned. If not for all the complicated feelings Sophie now has for Jesse, Ian’s arrival would have been a thrill, but instead it just complicates her feelings even more.

Sid and Hannah invite everyone to the bar after Sophie’s show for an impromptu wedding party where we learn that Sid is obsessed with trying to get groups of people to join him in the Electric Slide and Valentina and Charlie can’t keep their hands off each other despite breaking up. Sophie invites Ian because she’s excited at the prospect of rekindling something with him now that he’ll be on her continent, but not only is she struggling to figure out her feelings for Jesse, but her ex Drew shows up (drunk off of oat milk white Russians, and looking crazy thanks to a spray tan and tooth-whitening special he just got at a sketchy mid-town salon where he also kissed the receptionist to get codeine), and both men keep distracting her from Ian. Ian who she realizes is really great, but he’s just in the right place at the wrong time, so she tells him she just can’t pursue anything with him right now.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While the obvious comparison is How I Met Your Mother, I can’t help but feel like this new iteration of the show shares some DNA with Hulu’s one-season wonder Maggie, in which a psychic named Maggie (Rebecca Rittenhouse) sees a glimpse of her future (at her own wedding), and has to piece together who she ends up with. It’s like How I Met My Husband, as Maggie tries to work out who she ended up with (alas we’ll never know because the show was canned). Both series are rom-coms, but neither one really pulls its weight in the “com” department.

Our Take: There’s a risk in spinning off a show from something that was so successful, and we all know big risks have either great payoffs or big losses. I spent nine seasons watching and enjoying How I Met Your Mother, and yet I struggle to enjoy How I Met Your Father. As a spinoff, the risk feels like it doesn’t pay off. But even as a show judged independently of its predecessor, it just lacks so many elements that an endearing, funny sitcom needs.

Some of my disappointment has to do with the actors’ chemistry, which doesn’t make me want to root for anyone to get together or be the actual father, but most of my disappointment lies with the truly awful jokes – “jokes” – in the show. There are too many good writers in Hollywood for us to get drivel like a marine biologist character referring to someone who looks confused by saying, “He looks like an anglerfish who just saw a crab!” (When Sophie seems confused by this, Ian tells her that joke would have killed back on his boat full of other marine biologists.) I don’t know why this line offends me so much, I’m not a marine biologist, but I am someone who appreciates humor, and this is just lazy seafood word salad.

The only thing the show truly has going for it are the references it makes to its predecessor; in the final moments of the episode, Sophie rear ends a car and the driver happens to be Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris). We only see him for a moment, much like we only saw Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) briefly last season, but the familiar presence of adults we trust makes the entire situation feel comforting, less bad than it actually is, if only for a brief moment. But a show can’t exist on comforting cameos alone. HIMYM was a show that certainly wasn’t perfect, nine seasons is a long time to maintain flawless quality control, but like, say, Lost, it was a show you forgave when it had a bad episode, and you pushed through for the sake of the ending, because it made you care how it ended. (Even if the ending was also not very good, at least we got there!)

The biggest flaw in How I Met Your Father, even two seasons in, is that I still don’t care how it ends.

Sex and Skin: Every time exes Valentina and Charlie (Tom Ainsley) touch, he mentions that he’s hard. Over on CBS, Ted Mosby would never, but this is Hulu, baby. We can talk about erections very specifically here!

Parting Shot: The whole gang of friends join in to do the Electric Slide at the bar, fulfilling Sid’s one lifelong dream.

Sleeper Star: For all of the show’s faults, I do think that Hilary Duff is the best part of the show, she understands her assignment and she’s good at playing both hopeless and romantic.

Most Pilot-y Line: “And that’s when it happened,” narrator Sophie says, as both Jesse and Drew approach her while she’s flirting with Ian. “Both of them hurtling toward me at the exact same time like emotional man-asteroids, determined to blow up my spot.” I guess I just wish someone, anyone, considered what the words “blow up my spot” sound like in Kim Cattrall dialect, because it is for sure 100% doesn’t roll off her tongue.

Our Call: SKIP IT. I wish I liked this show more, it’s not like it’s a major buzzkill (“Major Buzzkill.”) but wishing something was great doesn’t mean it is.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.