‘How I Met Your Mother’ season 9 spoilers: Neil Patrick Harris and a progress report

Now that the temporary hiatus is done and over with, the cast of “How I Met Your Mother” continue to keep chugging along when it comes to production of their ninth and final season. It will hopefully be an exciting one, but here is one ominous thought already as to how close we are to the end: The cast has already finished filming more than 20% of their episodes. It’s only a little more than a month away from the September 23 premiere, and once we arrive at that date, it will really start to feel as though the time is blowing by.

The progress of the show’s final season was confirmed in a post on Twitter by none other Neil Patrick Harris, who had the following message to share:

“Just finished shooting Season 9’s 5th episode of HIMYM. I’m happy to say, they are uniformly great. Excited about our final season!”

Some of what has us excited is that in some ways, this is not going to feel like exactly the same show. The format in terms of the timeline is very different, with us only spending two actual days leading up to Barney and Robin’s wedding. However, there will be flashbacks aplenty, and this span of time in Farhampton is going to be jam-packed of all sorts of events. Basically, almost everything that you would expect to see go wrong in a wedding weekend probably will, and there are some other issues that are going to need to be dealt with, as well. There is still a large mystery looming about whether or not we are going to be seeing Marshall and Lily move to Italy, and Ted needs to get his own future with you-know-who set up.

Plus, there should be some other funny callbacks, whether it be the return of the slap bet or Robin Sparkles, who could have another appearance depending on what the writers come up with. Good times for all!

Photo: CBS