Tours including How I Met Your Mother
Explore New York City's famous TV & movie locations!
Tours featuring How I Met Your Mother
New York TV & Movie Tour
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Customer Reviews“This tour is excellent and I would recomend it to any movie lover visiting New York. A great value for the money.”
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“My solution to the strike was to hop aboard an On Location Tours bus to see some of NYC’s most famed movie and TV locations live and in 3-D.”
-Entertainment Weekly, Jan. 2008
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How I Met Your Mother is the situational comedy created by Craig Thomas and Carter Bays and premiered in 2005. The Sitcom is based around the main character, Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), in his search throughout New York City for the love of his life. Bob Saget narrates Ted’s stories from the year 2030, recounting his experiences to his son and daughter that lead to Ted’s meeting their mother. How I Met Your Mother's main characters also include Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), and Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan).
Like Friends, How I Met Your Mother focuses on a group of friends living in New York City. Also like Friends, the show is filmed on a studio in Los Angeles, but uses what are called "establishing shots" of NYC locations to set the feel of living in the Big Apple.
How I Met Your Mother is inspired by Craig Thomas and Carter Bays life, friends, and all the stupid stuff they did in Manhattan. In fact, Ted’s character based on Carter’s real life, and Marshall and Lily’s characters are based on Craig’s and his wife. The bar "MacLaren's," in which some of the show is set, is based on a bar in New York called McGee's Pub, on 55th Street. On the New York TV and Movie Sites Tour, you’ll stop at McGee’s and explore the inspiration for the HIMYM characters’ favorite hangout.
Because the show is filmed in Los Angeles, the locations used on the actual show are all built on sound stages in the studio. However, many locations are modeled on real places in New York City.
For example, Robin is a news anchor for Metro News 1, based on NY1, the real twenty-four-hour cable-news television channel focusing on the five boroughs of New York City, New York. Throughout the series, Metro News 1 is made fun of by the characters, with jokes particularly aimed at an anchor named "Sandy Rivers," who actually reads the newspaper to viewers on camera. "In the Papers" is a real segment on NY1, where anchor Pat Kiernan reads news articles live.
In the second episode of the fourth season, entitled "The Best Burger in New York," details Marshall and the gang’s search for a burger joint that Marshall visited when he first came to New York. It was the best burger he ever tasted, but he has since forgotten the location. All he knows is that the burger joint had a green door and red neon sign that says "BURGER." Searching in vain for eight years for the burger place, Marshall mocks real-life New York burger joints Corner Bistro and Paul’s Da Burger Joint as being inferior. Throughout the episode, the crew gets clues from different people around the city and searches all around Manhattan for the burger joint. After finding the burger joint’s address to be 106th Street and Manhattan Avenue, they arrived to find an ATM machine in its place. Finally they pay a strip club bouncer to give them the new address of the burger joint and all is well in the gastronomic world. We don’t visit this location on our tours, but if you make the trek up to 106th St and Manhattan Ave, you won’t find a burger joint or an ATM… but you will find Ichie Japanese restaurant.
Also in Season 4, the episode "Woooo!" features the gang visiting a country-western style bar with a group of "Woo Girls": single girls who love to go out partying and constantly shout "woo!" While the bar scene was shot on a studio set in LA, a similar bar exists in New York City: Cowgirl Hall of Fame on 519 Hudson Street. They even serve (Marshall’s favorite) fruity drinks in glasses shaped like boots. This bar was also featured on an episode of Sex and the City and can be seen on our Sex and the City Hotspots Tour.
* In an effort to stay current, we are constantly updating our tours with new locations and cannot guarantee the presence of locations mentioned on our site. If you have a particular interest in locations from a specific TV show or movie, please let your tour guide know and we will do our best to accomodate your request.
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On Location TV & Movie Tours
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