10 Insane Foreign Remakes Of Famous TV Shows

2. Russian How I Met Your Mother

If it's surreality you want then, brother, you came to the right place. The American How I Met Your Mother finally got to the end of its story, for better or for worse (most people thought worse) this year, but the Russian adaptation of How I Met Your Mother? That's only just getting started. Honestly, a Russian version of the McLaren's gang sounds like the sort of self-referential running joke the original show would've made, like the dopplegangers the group run into across New York city (stripper Lilly, Mexican wrestler Ted et al). Nope, it's totally a real thing, and it looks pretty much as you'd imagine a cheap Soviet remake of a successful American sitcom to look. The characters are all just Russian facsimiles of the original cast, the sets look the same but on a fraction of the budget, and the premise is the same down to the older, off-screen Ted recounting the whole thing to his kids. Like an eerie David Lynch film, however, it's in the slight deviations from the norm that make the Russian How I Met Your Mother so insane. For example, where the charmingly douchey Barney Stinson is played by the handsome Neil Patrick Harris in the original - someone you can imagine getting laid despite being hugely irritating - the Russian equivalent is, erm, slightly less easy on the eyes. As in he looks like he could've been a Soviet secret police interrogator in a past life. The low budget makes everything look so much seedier, too, which we suppose makes sense since Ted's kids look way younger than the original, making his recounting of his sexual exploits all the more inappropriate. Throw in the fact that the Russian version of Robin has Let's Go To The Mall, the pop hit that the original Robin had as a teen idol in Canada, and stuff gets really weird. Do they exist in the same universe? Why do these Russian people have the exact same lives as people in America? Is this Carl Jung's synchronicity in action? What's going on??