How I Met Your Father review – stale sequel is for nostalgia fans only
18.01.2022 - 22:43
/ msn.com
Related: Somebody Somewhere review – Bridget Everett anchors endearing comedy This sequel, starring Hilary Duff as the central hopeless romantic, freshens up the cast’s diversity and the timeline – Duff’s Sophie is bumbling through 2022 – but barely warms over anything else, laugh track included. The pitched, jovial performances and homey sets recall the original (there are other, more overt connections, which Hulu has requested not to spoil), and so, unfortunately, do the anodyne punchlines, maybe two of which land an episode.
The four 25-minute episodes made available for review sprinkle in the likes of Tinder, Uber and the ghosts of viral videos past, but it’s a mechanical, stale simulacrum of friend hangs and dating in 2022, a relic of a bygone era that enters the sitcom uncanny valley. There’s not much reason to continue through unless the beats recalled some past time of curling up with the TV.
The pilot of HIMYF, written by creators Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger and directed by Pamela Fryman (who directed all but 12 episodes of the original), opens, like HIMYM, in the future. In 2050, the older Sophie, played with vigor by Kim Cattrall, regales her son (a disembodied voice on the phone) with the story of how she met his father in 2020s New York (with help from uncooperative digital assistant and wine).
Back in 2022, Sophie is a 29-year-old photographer living in Queens with her fashionable, libidinous roommate Valentina (Francia Raisa) and Valentina’s brand-new hunk boyfriend Charlie (Tom Ainsley), a posh and cartoonishly naive Englishman she convinced to hop the pond on a whim. (Sophie turns 30 in the fourth episode with a party she hastily classes up to impress a suitor played by Josh Peck, a familiar face
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