MONDO EXTRAS

TWoP: That second half of the season was amazing. The episodes were some of my favorites and really crazy funny.

CT: Thank you so much. We're really proud of it. Not only should it not have been any good, it should have made no sense. It could have just been a weird descent into madness, because we had no time to do any of it. But ultimately, it came out well. So when we first started back up, it was like, "Oh my God, how do we go back and do this again?" But then you're right back in. And when you're writing a show, you're also kind of a fan of that show hopefully, and it's nice to start spending time with these characters again. I kind of wanted to see what would happen. You start writing and getting creative and playful and letting these characters show you where they are going. It's a pretty fun feeling. With your writing staff, it's this shared hallucination in this real world you've created, a little bit. You care about these people. You want to see what's going to happen to them, and it's fun. You can write a show and be a fan of it at the same time. Which is a great thing.

TWoP: I liked the decision to make Barney go back to his womanizing ways. Because at first he and Robin made so much sense...

CT: They do. They make more sense than Ted and Robin in some ways.

TWoP: They really do. I thought it was nice. But the girls are part of what make him Barney.

CT: We didn't want to not have Barney be Barney, but it's nice along the way discovering dimensions to him. Discovering things about his past. What made him the way he is and knowing that there is part of him that's a great guy. He's just unequipped to pursue that part. And sort of unapologetically so. He's not going to sit there apologizing that he's not going to enhance the goodness buried deep within him. He's just like, "I'm Barney. This is what I do."

TWoP: Are you ever worried about making him too crazy over-the-top?

CT: Absolutely. We worry about it sometimes. We try and make sure within each season we know ways to deepen Barney or complicate him or just throw some little hint of something more into the character. I always think of him as kind of like a superhero. We did that story of how Barney became Barney, where he was a hippie and the yuppie suit guy stole his girl away from him. We very much envisioned that as a superhero origin story. Or like how Darth Vader became Darth Vader. I really like that idea that Barney has this mythology of all these layers and issues with his dad and issues with women. It makes it so much more fun to write, and it makes him not just a cartoon character. And when you have those episodes where he's just being over the top, you feel like you've earned them more.