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With Actor’s 11th-Hour Signing, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Comes Back From the Dead

Dec 26, 2012  •  Post A Comment

CBS has confirmed that the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” will be back for a ninth season after the network got actor Jason Segel to agree to one more year on the series, Deadline.com reports.

The fate of the show appeared to be hanging in the balance as late as Friday evening as Segel, who has launched a successful film career away from the series, including ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "The Muppets," had seriously considered leaving the ensemble show.

“Now ‘HIMYM‘s’ 9th season is secure even if the network and the studio and the cast are keeping mum right now,” Nikki Finke wrote late Friday in the Deadline report. “Of course there was drama aplenty culminating today when all the cast deals closed after hard work by agents and managers and lawyers and executives and after an 11th hour turnaround of Jason Segel, who was set on bailing.”

Finke continues: “So here’s what happened: ‘HIMYM’ is in the last year of its current license deal with the network, while the contracts of creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays and the cast are all up at the end of the season. Understandably, Thomas and Bays had requested a decision to be made by the end of this month because of the overarching mythology of the show, which needs to finally begin building toward that big mother reveal when an end date is set. As the clock kept ticking, activity on all three fronts stepped up between CBS and ‘HIMYM’ producer 20th Century Fox TV as well as between 20th TV and Thomas-Bays and between the studio and reps for the series’ stars: Jason Segel, Josh Radnor, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris and Alyson Hannigan.

“It was well-known that Segel was the lone holdout with everyone else wanting to continue. After all, a virtual unknown when the show launched in 2005, he has a prolific film career now and gave the sitcom 8 seasons already. I learned tonight that Segel indeed ‘decided to bail and leave the cast hanging. But he just got turned around today at the last second. The show was literally dead.’”

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