Next fall will see ABC stretching one night at a bar into an entire multi-episode rom-com, while CBS details two harrowing weeks in the lives of Toni Collette and a non-pants-less Dylan McDermott. Now CBS boss Nina Tassler is ready to make condensed storytelling the Next Big Thing for the 2013-14 seasons (along with bionically enhanced cops and Robin Williams nattering away to himself about God knows what), confirming that the events of How I Met Your Mother’s ninth and final season will take place over the course of a single weekend. “The longest wedding weekend ever,” according to co-creator Carter Bays, but 48 hours nonetheless—which could very well feel like 20-plus episodes of a television show, seeing as How I Met Your Mother has already stretched the simple story of a meet-cute into an eight-years-and-counting epic. And as if the show hasn’t put off the inevitable (and the mentioned-in-the-title) long enough, Tassler told TV Line that Josh Radnor’s Ted will be the last member of the ensemble to meet the mysterious, bass-and-yellow-umbrella-toting figure played by Cristin Milioti—suggesting several long and probing conversations between Milioti’s character and, say, Wendy the Waitress, either of Bryan Cranston and Bob Odenkirk’s asshole boss characters, and maybe even that secretary Britney Spears played one time. Limited and weirdly constrained as it is, How I Met Your Mother has to fill the time somehow—what if one episode is just Milioti doing a 22-minute improvised bass solo?
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