How I Met Your Mother creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas have signed a rich overall pact with 20th Century Fox TV. The duo’s new deal is a three-year, eight-figure mega-deal that keeps them on HIMYM through a potential season eight and starts the ball rolling on new development projects.
First on the new-project list is a sitcom from Mother scribes Kourtney Kang and Joe Kelly about a couple who are dating and mulling the next stage of their relationship. Bays and Thomas are on board to exec produce.
“It feels like a logical extension of How I Met Your Mother, with a couple at the center of it, instead of being about the single life,” Thomas said, according to Variety. “We grew up writing Mother, and now we can figure out the next chapter of the story.”
Bays, says The Hollywood Reporter, added, “The new show is similar tonally to HIMYM and investigates the next chapter, the next stage of adulthood.”
“We’re not taking our eye off How I Met Your Mother,” Thomas said. “But it’s enough of a well-oiled machine.”
“I would have signed them to a ten-year overall deal,” 20th Century Fox TV chairman Dana Walden said, according to Variety. “There really is nothing more gratifying for a studio person than starting with writers at the beginning of their career and watching them blossoming into extraordinary showrunners. Taking a meeting with them is a high point of any day.”
UTA-repped Bays and Thomas landed at 20th some eight years ago when the twentysomething writers headed to Hollywood after a five-year stint on Late Show With David Letterman.
