Despite the show being vastly different to what fans were expecting when Disney announced a follow-up to the 2002-2004 Disney Channel series Lizzie McGuire, there’s still a lot to like in Hulu’s How I Met Your Father. Considering what was revealed of the direction of the doomed sequel-series, this might actually be the best case scenario.
Hot off the heels of a co-starring role in Darren Star’s TV Land series Younger, the announcement that Hilary Duff would be returning to the role that made her famous excited fans far and wide. It seemed a natural for a reboot/sequel, both as a draw for Disney+ subscribers, and for those who grew up with Lizzie McGuire in their formative years and were eager to see how she, like themselves, would navigate adulthood.
Sadly it was not to be, as creative turmoil saw the reboot losing original creator Terri Minsky due to creative differences with Disney over the tone of the of the series. The reboot would have seen Lizzie returning home after finding her fiancé cheating on her and starting over at age 30. For fans of the original Lizzie McGuire it would have admittedly been slightly jarring to find her dealing with such a mature set of events. However, with Duff, Minsky, and most of the original cast returning though, it would have probably been the same show, just slightly more reflective of the complexities of adulthood.
Long rumored as a follow-up to CBS’ long-running How I Met Your Mother, How I Met Your Father finds Duff as Sophie, a lovelorn photographer in New York City, who sees herself drawn into a new circle of friends following a series of events culminating in a last-minute romantic dash to an airport. Sophie is flawed and frustrated, but kind and optimistic; in short what fans would expect from a 30-something Lizzie. Sophie’s backstory is wildly different from Lizzie’s nuclear family, with her an apparently only-child raised by a dysfunctional single mother. Character-wise, however, it’s not wildly dissimilar. One can assume that despite the impetus for Lizzie’s return home being tinged with bleakness, as with Sophie, she wouldn’t let that define her.
Tonally, HIMYF is very much in the vein of it’s predecessor, right down to a few nods to the original series placing it as an indirect spin-off (to say nothing of using the conceit of it being a story being told decades down the line). It’s set in the real world, albeit one that’s exaggerated and larger-than-life and, like the original, is a four-camera sitcom with occasional single-camera moments and laugh track. Comparatively, it’s odd to note that Lizzie McGuire was a single-camera series without a laugh-track in 2002, while HIMYF’s a bit of throwback outlier on the contemporary TV landscape.
Where HIMYF falters from the outset is in the series of contrivances required to bring it’s under-developed characters together. This is where HIMYF ‘s failings in relation to How I Met Your Mother and Lizzie McGuire become apparent. In the case of the former, it’s how a similar set-up makes the clarity of the original casts personalities and connections from day-one stand out all the more, while in the latter it’s the fact that as a follow-up with a built-in set of characters this work had already been done, with only the passage of time to be filled in. Nevertheless, in the three episodes of HIMYF released thus far there have been tracks laid to pay dividends, and much room for growth and development.
While HIMYF isn’t a perfect series and exactly what fans of Lizzie McGuire were expecting from a sequel, there’s still much for them to enjoy in it, not the least of which being seeing Duff in the starring role of a woman entering her 30s with the support of her close friends. In essence, this is more or less what fans wanted from a Disney+ Lizzie McGuire, only instead of being a sequel to one beloved 2000s series it’s a sequel to another.
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