How I Met Your Mother season 1

How I Met Your Mother
Season 1
Season 1 DVD cover art
Starring	Josh Radnor Jason Segel Cobie Smulders Neil Patrick Harris Alyson Hannigan
No. of episodes	22
Release
Original network	CBS
Original release	September 19, 2005 (2005-09-19) – May 15, 2006 (2006-05-15)
Season chronology
Next → Season 2
List of episodes

The first season of How I Met Your Mother, an American sitcom created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, premiered on CBS in the United States on September 19, 2005, and concluded on May 15, 2006. The season was directed by Pamela Fryman and produced by Bays & Thomas Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. It consists of 22 episodes, each running approximately 22 minutes in length.

The season introduces Ted Mosby (voiced by former Full House actor Bob Saget) in the year 2030 as he sits his daughter and son down to tell them the story of how he met their mother. The story begins in 2005 with Ted (Josh Radnor) as a single, 27-year-old architect living in Manhattan with his two best friends from college: Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), a law student, and Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan), a kindergarten teacher, who have been dating for almost nine years when Marshall proposes. Their engagement causes Ted to think about marriage and finding his soul mate, much to the disgust of his self-appointed best friend Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris). Ted begins his search for his perfect mate and meets an ambitious young reporter, Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), whom he quickly falls in love with.

The first season garnered mixed-to-positive reviews, despite this the show appeared on several television best lists. The first season garnered an average of 9.47 million viewers per all 22 episodes in the U.S. Out of all regular primetime programming that aired during the 2005–2006 American television season, How I Met Your Mother ranked 51st out of 156, according to the Nielsen ratings system.