How I Put Off Meeting Your Mother

How I Met Your Mother fans who might have been wavering about their commitment to the show after spending some eight years listening to the longest story in history broken up with increasingly unfunny and repetitive detours (hi, I am one such fan) were relieved to learn, late last year, that the show's ninth season would be its last. "No more wheel-spinning!" we thought. (I'll just speak for all of us.) "No more 'will they or won't they' with Ted (Josh Radnor) and Robin (Cobie Smulders) when we already know they won't! Finally, the promise of the title will be fulfilled, and we can all move on with our lives!"

That was, of course, before we knew the show's creators planned to set the whole season over the course of a single long weekend, the better, I guess, to give us a moment-by-moment read on Ted's thoughts and feelings in the last hours before he found his soulmate. We've already had some fun predicting the absurd lengths to which the show's writers could go to spin stories worth telling out of this short span of time that most of the characters logically would spend drinking and, eventually, getting dressed and stuff. But there's actually a worse way things could go.

It starts with CBS executives taking a searching look at their Monday-night comedy lineup. We Are Men is already dead. 2 Broke Girls is still getting judged on the basis of how racist each episode turns out to be. Mike & Molly is fine for now, but how can you keep Melissa McCarthy down on the farm when she co-headlined two of the fifteen top-grossing movies of 2013? Add to all this that the night's lead-off show is ending, and it won't take long before someone asks, "What if it wasn't?"

Their first call is to series co-creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays. Could they be convinced to hang on for another season? Sure! They've been heads-down on the final season and haven't had a chance (if Google and the trades are to be believed) to sell their next project yet -- not now that The Goodwin Games has already tanked. But here's a show where they don't even have to make up new characters and situations: they can keep spinning out the situation they already have! They won't even have to pack up their office! Packing is a hassle!

Next stop: the cast. Let's start with the couple who will, presumably, be newlyweds by the time Season 9 ends: Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin. Smulders could be a problem: she's a co-star in the Avengers franchise, and she's already got a toe in Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. -- not to mention that her role as Vince Vaughn's love interest in the upcoming feature Delivery Man heralds a new generation of young, attractive women coming into their own by playing the long-suffering wives and girlfriends of doughy, aging comic actors. (Keep it tight, Hannah Simone; you could be next!) But since her character is paired with that of Harris -- a man who has spent the last year reminding us that there isn't a job he'll refuse -- and since Smulders is Canadian and therefore has some doormat DNA, she can probably be talked into staying pretty easily.

Jason Segel is definitely a flight risk, having already been the holdout whose eleventh-hour capitulation made the ninth season possible. But what if Marshall wasn't on the show? Maybe New York State wants him to be a judge in, like, Utica; simple write-out. Obviously, there's no way Lily (Alyson Hannigan) would agree to move upstate with him, and if his ambitions trump his marriage, it does open the door for her to pursue her dream job in Italy, as they'd already decided they would when they were still together. But what if Lily decides the best way to get back at Marshall is with Chad, a hot, younger boyfriend? Nick Zano is eminently available. It might look lame for her to give up her career in order to stay close to her new slampiece, but then again, does anyone even remember what Lily does? She's a kindergarten teacher, right? Summer hiatus is long; most viewers won't even remember she was ever supposed to move away.

As for Radnor...uh, Radnor's free. He has no other prospects, and if he hasn't already gotten sick of his character dicking around trying to meet his eventual wife, he probably never will.

I know what you're thinking: what about the story? It's How I Met Your Mother. And we already know he's going to meet Mother (Cristin Milioti) at this wedding. But must the title be taken literally? Once Ted's met her, won't audiences want to see Ted and Mother hanging out, getting to know each other, figuring out that they're each other's The One? I mean, for God's sake, we've already seen Ted do this with so many other women we were pretty sure weren't actually going to end up being Mother -- but now when he's finally found the right one, we don't get to see them so much as go on a damn date? Anyway, is it even right for the show to be about Ted, but end with the wedding of two other non-Ted people? If there's a tenth season, it can end on Ted's wedding -- and isn't that probably what everyone really wants anyway? Why did we hang in with the show all this time if not to see the union of Ted and Mother witnessed by Barney and Robin and Lily and Chad?

It probably won't happen this way. But we've all seen enough terrible decisions made by TV executives and talent to know that it could, and that's why you can't ever count out...the nightmare scenario.