Actress Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha, Lola Versus) has signed on to star in How I Met Your Dad, a spinoff of How I Met Your Mother.
Is creating a spinoff a good idea? Probably not. It almost never is, with the very notable exception of Frasier. But this particular spinoff is an especially bad idea, because people simply do not meet one another in the way they used to. It’s less organic, less IN REAL LIFE than it used to be. This isn’t a bad thing, I don’t think, but following a Gerwig’s character Sally’s travails on Match.com probably won’t make for great television fodder.
Here are a few potential premises for How I Met Your Dad, if it were set in present day New York.
Texting Is Not Talking
After her most recent break-up, Sally goes drinking with her friends at MacLaren’s, their favorite bar in the East Village. In an effort to cheer her up, one of her friends gets her to converse with a guy. Sally realizes she is better at text messaging than talking, freaks out and pulls a quick Irish Goodbye from the bar. Her friends put her on an anti-texting rehabilitation program—and she goes through some serious withdrawal, the symptoms of which include sleep texting her ex-boyfriend at 3 a.m.
Tinder Me This
Sally downloads Tinder and begins deciding if she would like to hook up with men based almost exclusively on how they look. She hooks up with a number of men before deciding that using the app is a bit too easy for women and a fool’s errand. She deletes it for good when she finds her ex-boyfriend while she’s swiping away and breaks into existential tears.
What Does a Poke Mean, Anyway?
After another night of drinking at MacLaren’s, Sally comes home with Chinese takeout in tow and commences surfing Facebook. She finds a boy she went to high school with but never spoke to who recently moved to New York. He is good looking. In her drunkenness, Sally decides that the best way to approach him is by randomly “poking” him. To hers and her friends’ surprise, it works and she begins dating a guy she essentially met by poking on Facebook.
More Like OkStupid
Sally signs up for OkCupid, her first foray into the world of online dating. She weeds through the seemingly infinite creepy messages that dudes send her before ultimately meeting the man she will date for most of season one. She messaged him because they enjoyed some of the same television shows, and because he listed “bacon” on his profile as one of the six things he could not live without.
Tinder’s Revenge
Sally’s roommate and best friend meets a man on Tinder who, upon visiting their apartment, falls into immediate like with Sally. When her friend is in the restroom, the man says to Sally: “Oh my God. You’re the hotter one from her Tinder profile picture! I didn’t know if I would ever find you.” He is a total hunk, and Sally must ruminate on the unprecedented ethical dilemma she now faces that was enabled by burgeoning technology.
Lulu Sucks
Sally and her friends download Lulu and begin surfing for new potential suitors while also reviewing men they have trysted with in the past. The girls feel bad and try to set things right after finding that their negative reviews of a certain man may have been partially responsible for his nervous breakdown.
Earl the Lord and Savior
Fed up with classless men, Sally signs up for Christian Mingle. She meets a seemingly nice guy named Earl, and things go swimmingly for a while, until she realizes that this guy refuses to be intimate with her. Things get turbo awkward when he sees her birth control pills in her restroom and tells her she is a trollop who is definitely going to hell.
Is He The One?
In the season one finale, Sally messages a friend of a friend on Facebook, saying that she “digs his taste in music.” The two hit it off, and it seems as though Sally may have finally found The One worthy of bearing her children.
