The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Cristin Milioti, who landed the most enviable role ever on a television show with only one season left on it. She’s the “mother” in How I Met Your Mother. In the interview, she explains how tightly she kept the secret because her career pretty much depended on it. When they revealed her, I was really quite shocked. Not because I had ever seen her or heard of her before, but because they had actually cast her without my knowing about it.

What’s kind of odd is that the secrecy itself seems almost sitcomesque. More complicated than it needed to be. The better story would have been that yes, she was going to be on the show, but she was going to be a character who would come and go in a single episode (as many of Ted’s love interests do).

Speaking of HIMYM, Robert Charette wrote a great piece a while back about essentially unfair that show was. Even if you’ve never seen the show and have no interest in it, it touches on some of the themes discussed on Hit Coffee:

Throughout its run, HIMYM has stressed the importance of accepting signs from the universe. But the universe that Ted worships has a cruel sense of irony. At HIMYM’s outset, Ted was the most eager of the show’s five friends to marry and begin a family. Eight years later, Ted is the fifth wheel amongst two married couples. He has been locked in emotional cryogenic stasis since Barney and Robin announced their plan to marry, floundering as he sees the cad become an honest man and his college friends start a family.

It’s typical HIMYM-melodrama that Ted would finally meet the One in a scene out of Brief Encounter as he’s scurrying away from Barney and Robin’s wedding a discouraged and lonely man, a far cry from the wide-eyed dreamer we met in the show’s premiere. HIMYM expects the audience and Ted to remain obedient to love’s divine plan as the universe emotionally ravages him.

Barney – who landed the woman that Ted had been obsessing over off-and-on for eight seasons – of course being the alpha male and Ted being the beleaguered beta. Charette is on to something in that a show that theoretically indulges signs from the universe, the main sign that Ted had to heed was “Give up.”