'HIMYM' heads toward final season — with mother

Bill Keveney | USA TODAY

SAN DIEGO — Having finally identified the mother, where does How I Met Your Mother go next?

The CBS comedy ended last season with a brief peek at the long-awaited mother (Cristin Milioti), a young woman with a yellow umbrella, and will open its ninth and final season (Sept. 23) focused on the wedding weekend of Robin (Cobie Smulders) and Barney (Neil Patrick Harris).

The wedding framing device has "breathed this great life into the storytelling in a Year 9 show, just to be able to mix up the storytelling and find these suspenseful stories, some of which take place in this really compressed time frame, like an episode of 24 almost," co-creator Craig Thomas told USA TODAY in an interview before the show's first — and last — Comic-Con panel.

"But also we're a very flashback-y and flash-forward-y show, so we also aren't constricted or constrained by that. We can jump around. It's been a really great recipe," he added.

There was a time when it might not have happened this way. It took time to work out contracts and deals for a ninth season, and there was a chance the show would have had to finish up last season, hurriedly introducing the mother of Ted's (Josh Radnor) children in the final episodes.

"It would have been a very abrupt, staccato wrap-up if we had to wrap it up in like eight episodes at the end of last year," Thomas said.

"We could have ended it quickly, but there were so many things we wanted to get to," co-creator Carter Bays said. "That's kind of the fun of this whole season being set at a wedding — it really feels like a party. It feels like we're throwing a party, and everyone you've ever seen on the show will be back at some point."

That means numerous guest appearances, including the returns of Wayne Brady as Barney's brother and Frances Conroy as his mother. Previously unseen family members will show up, too.

Bays and Thomas, speaking along with fellow executive producer Pamela Fryman, said they plan to give fans other reminders of earlier seasons, including the end of the slap bet.

With 24 episodes, the writers will have time to merge the mother into the cast, although they won't say how or when.

"You're going to see how she bonds, how she fits with those characters. She's not just perfect for Ted, she's perfect for the group," Thomas said.

It's not easy trying to join a cast that has been together for eight years, but Milioti (Broadway's Once) has pulled it off, Fryman said.

"It's a tight group, the five of them, and she just walked right in and everybody opened their arms. It's effortless. She's lovely. She's so talented," Fryman said.

The producers watched the season finale in which the long-awaited mother was revealed with Milioti at McGee's, the bar in New York that is the inspiration for HIMYM's McLaren's. When Milioti came on-screen, "everybody in the bar turned and looked at her," Bays said.

"It was really fun to sit next to her and watch her jaw kind of drop when she realized she was going to be recognized," Thomas said.

What viewers do know about the mother is that she is a bass player, she plays in a wedding band, and she's studying economics at Columbia. She also does paintings of robots playing sports and makes breakfast foods sing show tunes.

"We'll get to know her over the course of the season," Bays said. "That was kind of the thing that tipped the scales for us to do a Season 9."

Other stories remain, including the wedding itself and Marshall's (Jason Segel) acceptance of a judgeship without having told Lily.

"Lily (Alyson Hannigan) thinks they're going to Rome and living her dream of living abroad for a year. And Marshall's sitting on this big secret. So Marshall is trying to get back to Lily to have one of the hardest talks of their relationship," Thomas said.

Two episodes have been shot, and the producers are happy with how the season is going.

"It's a love letter for the fans this season," Thomas said. "These fans have been with us for eight years. It's nice to have 24 shots at saying goodbye."