CBS renews ‘How I Met Your Mother’ for two seasons

CBS and 20th Century Fox TV have reached a deal to bring “How I Met Your Mother” back for two additional seasons.
The news first broke on Friday, with NYMag’s Vulture ahead of the reporting curve on the story.
The deal will run “How I Met Your Mother” through its eighth season and although nobody is saying anything about a finite end-date, there’s ample evidence that the cast may be looking to move on by that point. 
Busy co-star Jason Segel literally said as much in a GQ interview last year, while Neil Patrick Harris has been aggressively branching out into production and film roles. Josh Radnor’s debut as a writer-director played to acclaim at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and has begun a limited theatrical release and Cobie Smulders recently landed a high profile role in “The Avengers.” 
So if you’re actually one of those people who believes that the show won’t reveal the title Mother until the finale, you can possibly mark your calendar for May of 2013. Or perhaps that episode will just feature more coy hints about umbrellas, weddings and aunts, leading into a ninth season. Or perhaps the writers might find a way to introduce the Mother earlier and then find a way to — heaven forbid — develop the much-discussed character for a while before ending the series.
Now in its sixth season, “How I Met Your Mother” is averaging 10.2 million viewers, up very slightly from last year as it enjoys the end of a run of episodes airing without competition from ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars.” Vulture notes that “HIMYM” is one of CBS’ youngest skewing shows and that it, in fact, ranks as TV’s No. 13 show among viewers under 50. CBS has already renewed its other comedy anchors, “Big Bang Theory” and “Two adn a Half Men,” though obviously the future of the latter comedy is somewhat uncertain in the midst of the current Charlie Sheen kerfuffle. 
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