Alyson Hannigan

They Know All the Stupid Sitcom Writer Tricks

"How I Met Your Mother" a sitcom that stars Alyson Hannigan, Jason Segel, Neil Patrick Harris and Josh Radnor.

CBS may have been the most-watched broadcast network during last year’s prime-time season, but it never scored a decisive victory among viewers between ages 18 and 49. And this time around, its prospects for that elusive prize are riding, in no small measure, on the shoulders of two writers producing their first television show.

Craig Thomas, left, and Carter Bays say they drew heavily from their own experiences in writing "How I Met Your Mother."

Each got his primary training during four years spent drafting witty retorts and goofy skits for David Letterman’s viewer mail segments. And each marked his 30th birthday only last month, six days apart.

But those who might expect the pair - Carter Bays and Craig Thomas - to have emerged from Mr. Letterman’s "Late Show" writing room with a sitcom that is arch and cynical will be surprised to discover that theirs is a romantic comedy aspiring to be as uplifting as it is screwball. Titled "How I Met Your Mother," it is a show about destiny, namely the quest of its main character, a 27-year-old architect named Ted, who is scouring New York City in search of his soulmate.

Though its basic construction might appear ripped from the playbook of "Friends" or "Mad About You" - the ensemble surrounding Ted includes a newly engaged couple and a young skirt-chaser - "How I Met Your Mother" is in many ways quite fresh. Each episode is told through flashbacks, as Ted explains to his adolescent son and daughter the detours and dead ends he encountered along the road that led to his wedding day.

But the title is deliberately misleading: Ted does not meet their mother at the end of the first episode, and, though the producers are mum about the narrative of this first season, he is unlikely to do so by the third or the fifth episode, or any installment immediately thereafter. After all, the first conversation between father and children takes place in 2030. As the show’s executive producers, Mr. Bays and Mr. Thomas have given themselves plenty of time to tell the story.

"I think the show is more about the journey than the destination," said Mr. Thomas, during a recent break inside the show’s Spanish-style offices on the lot of the television company that produces it, Twentieth Century Fox. "It’s all the zigs and zags. Each episode is a puzzle."

As they set out to write a pilot last year, Mr. Bays and Mr. Thomas were intent on capturing the attention of one viewer in particular: Leslie Moonves, the CBS chairman. Though they didn’t know much about him, they did remember reading that he had gotten married (to Julie Chen, a host of "The Early Show" on CBS) last December.

"He’s got to be happy," Mr. Bays remembers saying to his writing partner. "Maybe he thinks it’s time for a show that’s optimistic and romantic and believes in something."

Maybe so. The pilot for "How I Met Your Mother" was one of the first that the network picked up last spring for this season. When it has its premiere on Sept. 19, it will be in a coveted time slot: 8:30 P.M. on Mondays, as a lead-in to the hit comedy "Two and a Half Men." But when asked, during an interview, if he had seen something of himself in the journey of the romantic lead, Mr. Moonves - who is 55, and previously divorced- responded with a roaring laugh.

"There is absolutely nothing about this show relatable to my story, in fairness," Mr. Moonves said. "This is about a 20-something-year-old guy looking for the love of his life. One of the things I love about my job is the naïveté of people, thinking what things will affect me."

But he was affected by it, if not in the way that Mr. Bays and Mr. Thomas anticipated. "The only thing that I said, scary to say, is that this is like the best type of show in this genre that I have seen since I saw the pilot of ’Friends’ back in my days at Warner Brothers," recalled Mr. Moonves, who was then president of the production studio. "You don’t want to build up expectations. But I think this is the show NBC was looking for all those years to be the next one."

If the situations depicted on the show feel like they could happen in real life, that is because many of them did - to Mr. Bays and Mr. Thomas.