How I Met Your Father early reactions are here and it seems like the spinoff is dead on arrival

It is almost time for the spinoff to the popular sitcom How I Met Your Mother in which Ted Mosbey ( Josh Rodner) tells his teenage son and daughter of his single life in New York City, his friends, and how he met their mother. The show aired for nine seasons and ran from 2005 to 2014.

The popularity of the show has led to Hulu, How I Met Your Father, developing the spinoff which will star Hilary Duff as Sophie recounting to her children how she met their father. Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall will play the older version of Sophie on the show.

While there have been successful spinoffs of popular shows in the past with shows like Fraser, Better Call Saul, Angel, and Xena the vast majority of them are flops, and according to early reviews How I Met Your Father is joining that list of flops.

"Part of the problem is, without the core chemistry (which may take a few episodes to work out), the new show so far also lacks the clever plot overlays we came to expect from Carter Bays and Craig Thomas’ original series. ... We’ve already seen too many sitcom disaster-party episodes, or crazy-night-out-at-the-club episodes (to name just a few themes from this first handful of episodes) to count, and that multi-cam/laugh track setup now seems even more dated than it did in the 2000s."

More amusing than funny, the two-part How I Met Your Father premiere presents a bog-standard multi-camera sitcom that neither treads interesting stylistic ground the way its predecessor did, nor presents characters or relationships that are nearly as engaging. It does, however, feature a long-term narrative hook that could prove to be its saving grace.

“How I Met Your Father” plays out like a millennial MadLib rather than a show all its own. Despite the constant reminders that “How I Met Your Father” takes place in 2022 — both from Hilary Duff as the lovelorn “I” and Kim Cattrall (very game here) as the same character narrating from her 2050 future— its every “modern” reference and joke setup still feel at least five years out of date.

Oddly, Father just feels more like a Friends rip-off, one of those Single Guy-ish wannabes where everyone is identically sweet-sarcastic-sexy-nice. I've seen four episodes, and the time-hopping gimmicks fade quickly into easily resolvable conflicts.

How I Met Your Father boasts a talented cast of young actors, too. But the material doesn’t rise to their level. It lacks the sharp wit that made How I Met Your Mother so appealing, and it relies too heavily on sentimental schmaltz that doesn’t feel earned.

How I Met Your Father currently has a 36% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but this is just based on what critics are saying about the show,

The show is set to premiere on January 18 on Disney and could still win over audiences and turn out to be a hit but only time will tell.