Greta Gerwig is the mastermind who brought us Frances Ha, Mistress America, and her recent directorial debut, Lady Bird, but she almost brought us a How I Met Your Mother spinoff as well. The offshoot of the CBS show, titled How I Met Your Dad, shot a pilot and everything, but then, as Gerwig explained to Stephen Colbert on the Late Show, audiences didn't like it. Or, rather, they didn't like her.
"We shot the pilot and it was so much fun!" she told the host. "I loved working on it."
And the next step after making a pilot is to take it to a focus group, and here's where things went wrong.
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"The audience, they're given knobs. They turn the knob to the right if they like it and to the left if they don't," Gerwig explained. "And apparently, they turned the knob to the left every time I came on...so yeah, they didn't like it. At all."
This is incredibly hard to believe, and disappointing to think we may never get this Gerwig-helmed spinoff, but we can comfort ourselves with the absolutely phenomenal reviews that critics are giving Lady Bird. The New York Times says the script is "exceptionally well-written, full of wordplay, and lively argument," and adds:
"I wish I could quote all of the jokes and recount the best offbeat bits...I’ll settle for one: the bittersweet feeling of having watched someone grow in front of your eyes, into a different and in some ways improved version of herself. In life, that’s a messy, endless process, which is one reason we need movies. Or to put it another way, even though Lady Bird will never be perfect, Lady Bird is."
The film currently has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes — HIMYD focus group be damned! Watch the interview below: