Will Jason Segel Be Fired From How I Met Your Mother Because Of This Quote?

Eight years is a long time to be chained to a network sitcom, especially when your career has blown up so much over the past few seasons that you are currently attached to star in big-budget features opposite Jack Black and Cameron Diaz, not to mention co-write The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made (really, that is the title). Just ask Jason Segel, who recently attempted to explain his dead-end How I Met Your Mother obligation to an interviewer and ended up sounding a bit resentful of the CBS series that helped make his name.

In an interview with GQ, the Forgetting Sarah Marshall star and scribe explained how he is still under contract for a sixth, seventh and eighth season of How I Met Your Mother, which is really more than he -- or his character, Marshall -- can handle:

"...When your idol is Peter Sellers, playing one character for eight years isn't what you're trying to do. I don't really feel like I have that much more to offer with this character. Maybe if we got divorced or something -- but that's not gonna happen. It's gonna be some iteration of, like, my TV wife opens the fridge, and she's like, "What happened to the birthday cake?" And I walk in with a little frosting here [points to corner of mouth] like, "What birthday cake?"

So does Segel even care about the eventual How I Met Your Mother conclusion?

"I had two other suggestions [about how the writers should end the series]. One is that they're dead. The two kids and their father -- they're dead, and they're in purgatory, and he's telling the story for eternity. [...] And then my other suggestion, which they never used, which I think would be so funny, is -- it's the future, right? I think in one of those scenes, they should open the window, and it should be, like, a postapocalyptic wasteland outside. It should be like I Am Legend. Horrible mutants."

Maybe CBS is better off just releasing Segel from his contract.

· He's No Dummy [GQ]