How I Met Your Father Repeats Barney’s Sibling Confusion (But Worse)
How I Met Your Father features another confusing sibling dynamic like HIMYM’s Barney and James, but makes Jesse and Ellen’s explanations worse. While Jesse and Ellen being questioned as mixed-race siblings is one of the first repeated running gags from HIMYM, it isn’t the only relationship that the spinoff takes from the original series. Right off the bat, How I Met Your Father introduces a dynamic that mirrors Robin and Ted with Sophie and Jesse, Sid and Hannah are essentially the new Marshall and Lily, and Sid and Jesse are best friends from college who happen to live together in Ted and Marshall’s old apartment. As episode 1 only gives a quick glimpse into the characters' lives, it’s difficult to tell how these other repeated relationships will compare to HIMYM, but Jesse and Ellen already made their family bond worse than Barney and James'.
Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) and his brother James (Wayne Brady) was one of the best side-relationships in HIMYM’s story, with their dynamic first being introduced in season 2. When Robin meets James, the gang tells her that he and Barney are very different because James is gay and HIMYM's Barney is an incessant womanizer. James arrives, and Robin is even more confused because James is Black and Barney is white. The story is that James and Barney are half-siblings, with both sharing a white mother while Barney’s father (John Lithgow) is white and James’ father (Ben Vereen) is Black. Even though the Stinson brothers don’t physically resemble one another, they never let anyone question them being family, especially since their mother once called them “little racists” when they asked why they didn’t look the same.
Related: How I Met Your Father’s Perfect HIMYM Cameo Character
Read more on screenrant.com
