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, fans were able to look it up and find every bad thing she’d written about Ted.
“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 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.”
In July 2007, the showrunners created a website with the URL “Slapcountdown.com” that 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,” 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.
The website helped make ‘Slapsgiving’ feel like a special event
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: “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.”
Thomas explained further, “There was a website; there was a song; there was arts and crafts; there was puns — 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.
“How I Met Your Mother” creators made over a dozen tie-in websites throughout the show’s run, most of which shut down after the series finale in 2014, but Slapcountdown.com was its only site released ahead of time to build up excitement for a specific plot point. “There was a lot of work going into making sure it would land on a Monday night roughly around the time in the episode that slap would probably fall,” Bays said. “There was a lot of math.”
