HIMYM renouvellé

Don’t go eyeballing that booth at McLaren’s just yet, because Ted, Barney, Robin, Lily and Marshall will be back for another round.

After what is being described as a last-minute change-of-heart by How I Met Your Mother regular Jason Segel, CBS, 20th Century Fox TV, series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas and the entire cast have reached a deal for the sitcom to return for a ninth season, our sister site Deadline reports.

The reported agreement comes in the midst of the final season of HIMYM‘s licensing deal with CBS and the last year of the current pacts for Carter/Bays and cast members Segel, Josh Radnor, Cobie “No S.H.I.E.L.D. for Me Yet” Smulders, Alyson Hannigan and Neil Patrick Harris.

Neither CBS nor 20th Century Fox TV immediately responded to TVLine’s request for comment on the report.

Segel, as had been suspected, was the lone holdout among the ensemble, Deadline says, as his film career becomes more flush — and until today he had in fact decided to walk away from the show, leaving it “literally dead.” But, a source tells Deadline, “he just got turned around … at the last second.”

When TVLine spoke with Bays just last week, he said everyone was “right in the middle of” “white-knuckled, nail-biting” negotiations. Though he was unsure if there would be news to report prior to the Television Critics Association winter press tour taking place in January, he said, “We’re all very confident it will work out.”
With CBS giving up some ground on Mondays this fall — due to problems with the 8:30 time slot and facing formidable competition from a solid Voice and the buzzy Revolution (which combined to score NBC regular wins) — securing HIMYM for another season was a priority for the network.