Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the TV urban legends featured so far.
TV URBAN LEGEND: There would be no Lily Aldrin on “How I Met Your Mother” had Alyson Hannigan not played her.
As I wrote in a TV Legends Revealed a while back, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, the creators of “How I Met Your Mother,” were so unsure about whether they would get picked up for a full first season that they wrote in a “backup” mother in case the show was canceled early. However, the character of Lily Aldrin might not have even made it that far, according to a legend involving Rebecca Alson-Milkman, the wife of show co-creator Craig Thomas.
Bays, Thomas and Alson-Milkman all attended Wesleyan University together in the late 1990s. The main characters in “How I Met Your Mother” of Ted Mosby (the sitcom was about him telling his kids the story of his life leading up to the time he met their mother) and his best friends Marshall Eriksen and Lily Aldrin, were based on the perpetually single Bays (Bays got married in 2011, during the show’s seventh season) and Thomas and Alson-Milkman, who have been a couple since college. As the story goes, Alson-Milkman did not like the idea of having a character based on her and would only agree to it if Alyson Hannigan played her character. Luckily, Hannigan was looking for a comedy after “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” went off the air, so she was, indeed, cast as Lily and the rest is sitcom history.
Or is it? Let’s find out!
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