Carter Bays Interview

Carter Bays Interview by IGN

IGN: At the end of last season, you went a long way towards revealing the mother. You know your fans will play Where's Waldo with that last shot of Ted's class.

Bays: We would expect nothing less from our fans! We were actually thinking of sneaking in… Someone had the idea of getting, like, Amy Adams, and just put her in the back row as an extra. So if you freeze it and you look carefully, it's like, "Oh yeah! Wait a minute…" But we didn't do that unfortunately.

IGN: I would assume you might still hold off awhile on actually introducing the mother, but the way the show works, she could be snuck in there at some point, right?

Bays: As always, we want to take our sweet time with it, but it's definitely… The pond just got a little bit smaller. As opposed to saying she's somewhere in the giant city of New York, she's somewhere in this little world that Ted's going to be in. Not every story is going to be in that world next year, but we'll be seeing more and more of it and we'll get tantalizingly closer than ever before.

IGN: She was obviously the one who was pregnant for more of the season, but you guys got especially creative with Alyson [Hannigan].

Bays: She didn't give us much of a choice! She just walked in one day and said, "Guess what guys? You're going to have to deal with this." It was a fun challenge to have. There's kind of a family first mentality at the show and more than anything we're just so happy for Aly and Cobie [Smulders] and that they had beautiful, healthy babies. The whole thing was fun. It was fun that there's now a second generation of How I Met Your Mother.

IGN: The Barney and Robin relationship has taken a big new step. As the season opens, how are they doing?

Bays: Well, it's not classic happily ever after, to say the least. It's two people that aren't programmed for happily ever after and never would have prioritized that, were it not for the fact that they're crazy about each other. So it's going to be a bumpy road for them. We'll have a lot of good stories. Now that things are out in the open for Barney and Robin, there's a lot of fun to be had.

IGN: Anything you can tease about what's to come?

Bays: There's a lot of good stuff. Our 100th episode is going to be this year, and we're writing a big musical number for that. That's going to be fun. We're going to finally get to see Neil [Patrick Harris] and the rest of the cast show off their musical theater chops. And I think you'll be surprised. Everyone's seen Cobie do her thing, but Josh [Radnor] is a bit of a song and dance man and Jason [Segel] of course has written his share of music too.