TVSquad

One of the advantages to being 31-year-old show-runners is that you can utilize your intimate relationship with the internet to effectively promote your show. That's what Carter Bays and Craig Thomas have been doing with How I Met Your Mother. First, it was Barney's Blog. Then it was the MySpace page for Robin Sparkles, complete with music video. Now, according to The New York Times, Bays and Thomas will be using MySpace again tonight, showing viewers scenes of Marshall's bachelor party that are too "racy" to be shown on TV. The deleted scene will be shown on the program's own MySpace page.

Bays and Thomas are using the internet because, as Thomas put it, "We're more like an NBC Thursday night comedy... but we happen to be on CBS. So how do we let young people know about our show if they're not watching the other shows on the network?"

Thanks to the efforts of former TVS writer Ryan Budke, this lovely little blog you're reading is high on the browsing list of the staff of How I Met Your Mother. In fact, they seem to like us quite a bit; at the CBS press tour party, co-creator Craig Thomas said he reads my reviews of the show every week, and executive producer Greg Malins came up to me while I was talking to Craig to tell me how much he loved the Squad (it sounded something like, "You guys are awesome!" But it was too loud in there for me to hear well. All I know is that it wasn't along the lines of "What a fine weblog you have, my dear fellow. Cheerio and pip pip.").

Anyway, because of this comfort level, I didn't have any problem asking the other co-creator, Carter Bays, a few questions about where the season is going, as well as some questions about not being picked to be in the post-Super Bowl slot. I also asked him about the origins of the two best episodes of the season, "Slap Bet" and "Swarley."

By the way, in the picture above, Craig is on the left and Carter is on the right. They look so young, don't they?