'How I Met Your Mother' Seals Deal for Ninth Season After Jason Segel Has Change of Heart

Well, this makes the frequent mentions of "probably the last season" in my How I Met Your Mother recaps on TV.com kind of awkward now. Looks like HIMYM will be back for a ninth season, according to a Deadline report, giving the show an estimated 24 more episodes to finally reveal who the mother is. It sounds like we can thank Jason Segel for making Season 9 a reality.

It was well-known that Segel was the lone holdout with everyone else wanting to continue. After all, a virtual unknown when the show launched in 2005, he has a prolific film career now and gave the sitcom 8 seasons already. I learned tonight that Segel indeed “decided to bail and leave the cast hangung. But he just got turned around today at the last second. The show was literally dead.”

Honestly, I wasn't expecting this to happen. After HIMYM got a two-season renewal a few years ago, I really believed the show would take advantage of the pickup and use it just like Lost did to plot out its endgame. With an additional season, what can we expect from HIMYM? Will the show just pad out a storyline that it could have wrapped up by the end of Season 8? Or did the Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, HIMYM's longtime showrunners, actually have pivotal plot points that they needed a ninth season to include?