How I Met Your Father creators on HIMYM callbacks and plans for season 2

Warning: This story contains spoilers from the first season of How I Met Your Father, which is now streaming on Hulu.

Haaaaave you met Sophie?

The Hilary Duff-led How I Met Your Mother spin-off closed its first chapter with two break-ups, the return of Kyle MacLachlan's The Captain, and a HIMYM guest appearance that just sparkled.

EW hopped on the phone with How I Met Your Father creators and showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger (This Is Us) to talk about HIMYM references viewers might have missed in the season 1 finale, their hopes for season 2, and whether Duff will ever get her own song as iconic as "Nothing Suits Me Like a Suit."

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How I Met Your Mother is such a beloved show. It's impressive how How I Met Your Father balances references to the original show while also creating unique characters and storyline. How did you go about creating How I Met Your Father and making the show its own?

ISAAC APTAKER: Thank you for saying that. I think it was one of the reasons we actually waited so long to bring a character as important as Robin [Cobie Smulders] into the show. We really wanted to establish this group of friends and let this thing stand on its own two feet and let people get to know them as a crew before we started bringing in characters from the original. It's been a really, really interesting balancing act to take something that's such a huge title and so loved and try to create something that honored it and has many similarities to it but also stands on its own two feet.

ELIZABETH BERGER: We were approached by 20th [Television] a number of years ago to write the pilot and they asked if we'd be interested in that, and we jumped at the chance. It was a show we were fans of and a world that we loved, and we were so excited to do it. [HIMYM co-creators] Carter [Bays] and Craig [Thomas] were so supportive. We wrote the pilot and there was a great internal response, and then we were tapped to co-run This Is Us. We thought, well that's a terrible time to also simultaneously try to write and launch a new series. It was sort of collectively agreed that we would hit pause. Fast forward all these years later, we're now in the final season of This Is Us, and Hilary Duff was just coming off of Younger. We had a meeting where we discussed the project, and in this very magical way, it came back to life very organically and very quickly. Once we spoke to Hilary about it and she read the script and responded to it that she was in, everything happened very quickly from that point after being stalled out for a number of years.

The past few years have seen a ton of other reboots, too. Was there anything you learned from seeing how other reboots played out that you brought forward into How I Met Your Father?

APTAKER: I think we really wanted to take this storytelling device and take this style of sitcom, which we don't feel like has been on TV for a while now, this multi-cam hangout show, and carry those forward into 2022, but make sure that it was a very different story told from a female point of view about a very different group of friends and find subtle ways to flip what they did in the original. In this one, we see future Sophie played by Kim Cattrall appearing on the screen as opposed to seeing the kids. There are lots of little ways we're upending what they did, but primarily we wanted this to stand on its own as a new story and not just retell what they did so excellently on the original.

That setup with us seeing Kim Cattrall narrate the show instead of seeing her son definitely allows for more diversity in the cast. Was that a part of your thought process?

BERGER: Yes, absolutely. Obviously, in our particular mystery with our particular cast, it would be a huge clue as to who the father is to see the kid on screen, so that was an early decision that just made sense. When we cast Kim, it reinforced that decision because we were so excited to have her on board and to see her and share her with audiences in all of her full glory. On multiple levels, it felt like the right decision to us.

APTAKER: I think it's a crime against television to have Kim Cattrall and not put her on the camera, it feels cruel.

It's such a strong ensemble between Kim Cattrall, Hilary Duff, and Francia Raisa. You come from shows like This Is Us and Love, Victor with great ensembles that can say the same. What stood out about working on this show in particular?

APTAKER: We had never done multi-cam before, and Elizabeth and I grew up loving them, and we'd always wanted to try one. We lucked out that we got [director] Pam Fryman who did all but six or eight episodes of the original. She's done seasons and seasons of Frasier and Two and a Half Men and has such experience in the format to help guide us into this very brave new world. It really is incredibly different from single cam. You get to rehearse with the actors, the way that you write and edit scenes is different, so it was such a thrill after doing quite a few seasons of TV now to try something totally different format-wise.

BERGER: We got so lucky with our cast. Because of the pandemic, so much of the casting process was done over Zoom, which is a very difficult way for actors to audition and for us to get a sense of chemistry, but everybody was such good sports throughout a very long process. When we finally got into the same room together for our first read-through ... it was so magical and such a big collective exhale to finally see them together and see how incredible they were when they actually got to be in real life together. We had a whole cast that had never done this format together either, and how hard they worked, and how much they supported each other was such a beautiful thing to witness. We're both just so proud of them and so in awe of how much they learned and accomplished throughout our first season.

How I Met Your Mother had such iconic discography with Robin Sparkles' music, "Nothing Suits Me Like A Suit," and even some random Marshall songs. Now we got an original How I Met Your Father song with "J Street." Do you think we'll be seeing more of that?

APTAKER: Oh my gosh, yes. And "J Street," we only got to play a little snippet on the show because the episode is so short, but Leighton [Meester] recorded a full-length version. We've gotta figure out how to get it out there because she has such a good voice, and we actually use this songwriter Leland who we used on Love, Victor and he writes for a number of major artists, and he composed that full original song for us. We would love to have more music on the show. Hilary is obviously so musical. Her husband [Matthew Koma] is a genius songwriter. I want to find something to do with him to pull him into our world. It's a great way to honor the original, and it's something that we and our cast loved, so we would be thrilled to have more songs.

In the finale, we saw references to The Captain, "Boats, Boats, Boats," and Glen McKenna. Are there any references from the season that you think viewers might have missed?

APTAKER: Did you catch that Ellen [Tien Tran] gets a job at an organic grocery store owned by Goliath? That's a little tidbit that we threw in that we're going to get into more in season 2. It felt like in a world where Amazon is buying Whole Foods, why can't a major bank buy an organic grocery store?

This season was a romantic rollercoaster for Sophie, seeing her go on a hopeful date with Ian, fall for the adorable Drew (Josh Peck), and finally give Jess (Chris Lowell) a chance. What can we expect next for Sophie?

BERGER: I think it's clear that this is someone that is still figuring herself out and figuring out what she wants out of life and how to be a partner to someone else. One of the things we talked a lot about towards the end of our season was that idea of searching, searching, searching for your person, and then you get to be with someone great briefly and you kind of blow it up and self-sabotage. Whether you think Sophie did that or you think it was justified, that's open to debate, but that idea really intrigued us, the idea that you can really want to be with someone but you can't be with someone until you're ready and have figured yourself out as an individual. I think we're going to continue to see that journey and self-discovery and coming into her own, and figuring out who she is, and that will help dictate when she's ready to really be with somebody else.

I have to ask… do you know who the father is?

APTAKER: We do know who the father is. If we had to, gun to our head — I don't know why someone would put a gun to our head — [we could] write a finale tomorrow. That's something we've learned from This Is Us; we always have a plan. We don't put something on TV if we don't know where we think it's going because nothing keeps you like that. At the same time, we know that this is hopefully a long run, and we're flexible to changing our plan. We're going to see what develops while knowing the ending in our heads and being open to that adjusting.

Looking forward to next season and any potential seasons after that, are there any things on your bucket list of what you hope to see on the screen during the run of How I Met Your Father?

APTAKER: [In season 2], we're doing a longer order with 20 episodes. With 10, there were so many stories that we wanted to do and didn't have room for because you feel pressure of each one to move the ball forward in terms of the mystery and the serialized plots. I'm excited to do some epic nights out, gang's worst hangovers, gang lost in the city trying to find their brunch spot, those days that you always remember even though they were random or ordinary. I think a show like this really lives or dies on those episodes.

Do either of you have a favorite episode or scene from this season?

BERGER: I have so many. I have a real fondness for very early on. It was just a little pop but our whole cast was shooting them playing drunk Jenga together, and it was one of the first times when I just got to feel the magic and the fun of how joyful it was to hang out with this group and watch them be silly. It really reminded me of hanging out with my own group of friends. It was that moment that I thought, "This is really going to work. These people are a blast to hang out with." That tiny little pop holds a real soft spot in my heart.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Related content:

• Cobie Smulders returns as Robin Scherbatsky in How I Met Your Father season 1 finale
• How I Met Your Father pays tribute to HIMYM narrator Bob Saget in premiere
• Hilary Duff talks How I Met Your Father nerves and being starstruck over Kim Cattrall
• What to Watch: Time to learn How I Met Your Father with Hulu's HIMYM spin-off