Maureen Ryan sure does love How I Met Your Mother. I scan the news sites every few days to see what the world is talking about regarding HIMYM and I am constantly reading the Chicago Tribune. If you’ve been following this site you already know that, but Maureen is up to it again. She’s a real fan of the show and has gathered some behind the scenes info about the show.

Did you know it takes them 3 days to shoot one episode when most sitcoms take about 3 hours? How about the fact that the laugh track (which I don’t care for) is added after all the shooting by a live audience watching a taped version of the show? Me either. The article has more tidbits like this but my favorite quote was about adding the laugh track:

For one thing, some “single-camera” shows use more than one camera at a time. And though “HIMYM” does have a laugh track, the fact that the laughs (from a studio audience that watches a tape of the show) are put in after filming means the comedy is not “a slave to the audience” as executive producer Greg Malins says.

“You’re not writing to their reactions and writing to the lowest common denominator,” Malins said says. On other shows he has worked on, “any time you need to replace a joke and you just put the word `panty’ in there, the audience goes nuts. It’s hard to resist that.”

At the end of the article she gives us a few hints to upcoming episodes.

In the February episode “Lucky Penny,” Barney ends up running a marathon, and the track suits that Neil Patrick Harris wore on Wednesday were quite fancy. He has one powder-blue track suit that was nearly blinding, with matching silver running shoes. He called the ensemble his “B. Diddy” look. Thomas says there was a big debate as to whether Barney would run the marathon in one of his regular “suit up!” suits, but in the end they decided that he could “track suit up.”

Bays dropped this tantalizing idea about Barney, when I asked whether he would ever have a steady girlfriend. “What if he had a girlfriend but he just wasn’t bringing her around?” Hmmm.

Head over to the Chicago Tribune for the whole article.