\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
Whenever “How I Met Your Mother” introduced a fictional website into the story, the writers would almost always create a real site along with it. When a minor character mentions creating a site titled Ted Mosby is a jerk.com, for instance,\u00a0fans were able to look it up and find every bad thing she’d written about Ted.<\/p>\n
“People weren’t really taking advantage of the fact that people were watching TV while their laptop was open in front of them,” showrunner Carter Bays told EW<\/a> in 2017. “That was at a time when we were really excited about the possibilities of these kind of off-show websites that existed in real life.”<\/p>\n In July 2007,\u00a0the showrunners created a website with the URL “Slapcountdown.com”\u00a0that showed a timer ticking down to Season 3’s Thanksgiving episode. Two months later in the season premiere, Marshall (Jason Segal) ominously shows Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) the site, this time with only 55 days left on the clock. The site counted down to the moment in the Thanksgiving episode, “Slapsgiving,”<\/a> where Marshall slaps poor Barney right across the face. The episode’s premise was a continuation of Season 2’s standout episode “Slap Bet,” in which Marshall wins the right to slap Barney fives time at any moment he chooses.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n The website helped make ‘Slapsgiving’ feel like a special event<\/p>\n Creator Carter Bays described the countdown as one of the new opportunities that came with writing a sitcom in the early days of the Internet era:\u00a0“We can establish a ticking clock on the show and just have it in real life.” For co-showrunner Craig Thomas, the site tied in nicely with what he saw as one of the funniest aspects of the episode: The idea of someone working “really, really, really hard on something really, really, really dumb.”<\/p>\n Thomas explained further, “There was a website; there was a song; there was arts and crafts; there was puns \u2014 it was such a multimedia onslaught of an effort that went into something that’s about a guy slapping another guy in his face.” Marshall would continue to put in an excessive amount of time and effort into his next two Slapsgiving celebrations, but the original “Slapsgiving” would always be one of the best Thanksgiving episodes on TV<\/a>.<\/p>\n