For a sitcom, How I Met Your Mother has never been afraid to be fairly experimental and bend the boundaries of its format and that will certainly be the case in tonight’s episode, “Bedtime Stories” which will be done completely in rhyme.

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On a visit to the set of How I Met Your Mother last week, at a celebration for the series reaching its milestone 200th episode (coming later this season), co-creator Carter Bays said that when it came to writing the rhyming episode, “It was so much easier than it seemed [it would be]. To the point that what was difficult was writing the next episode and not being able to rhyme!”Added co-creator Craig Thomas, with a grin, “That's why the rest of the season after that is all going to rhyme! We can't go back. Once that flip is switched, there's no option. You can't go backwards!” More seriously, he remarked, “Our big thing was a good Season 9 episode is one we've never done before; that we can only do this season. And that's one of them. I think a lot of these Season 9 episodes -- half, if not all of them -- we've never done that before and you'll see... It fits in.”Josh Radnor described “Bedtime Stories” as, “Super fun and I just thought that was such an imaginative episode. There's a bunch of flashbacks. It's not told in rhyme for no reason. There's actually a really good reason the whole episode is told in rhyme. It's a great episode. Super weird. Never been done on television before... I don't think!”We know the episode involves Marshall telling baby Marvin a bedtime story, and Neil Patrick Harris explained, “The structure of the flashbacks are that Marshall is recounting crazy things that have happened to each one of us and so there's a great adventure that Robin tells about this crazy night where she sort of had superhuman powers and Barney recounts this great tale of how he is the ultimate player in New York City.”Alyson Hannigan also was excited by that episode, exclaiming, “Oh, that was fun. That's probably one of my favorites. But it was hard not to do it like Dr. Seuss and make it conversational.” She then added, complete with a tongue-in-cheek drum/rimshot tapped on the table she was sitting at at the end, “Because you know, I read a lot of children’s books... And then my kids ask me to read to them!”

How I Met Your Mother: "Bedtime Stories" airs Monday, November 25th at 8pm ET/PT on CBS.Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @EricIGN , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman