This story is not going to be legendary. Don’t wait for it.

How I Met Your Father, which premiered on Hulu this week, is not so much a reboot of How I Met Your Mother but rather a tepid, watered-down continuation of the original, like a second cup of tea from the same teabag. While the basic plot follows the same structures, the cast is not as charming, the writing is not as witty, and there’s really no one worth rooting for from the get-go.

How I Met Your Father starts Hilary Duff as Sophie, a starry-eyed romantic searching for her soul-mate on Tinder. in the pilot, she finds him, and possibly loses him right away. Or does she? Father introduces us to a plethora of characters that instantly become a close-knit group, despite most of them not knowing each other as the show begins. Sophie has her first and last date with marine biologist Ian (Daniel Augustin), who despite hitting it off with Sophie (per her voiceover; any sparks between the two are not seen on screen), is departing for Australia that night.

Sophie enlists Jesse (Chris Lowell), the Uber driver who dropped her off at her date and all his friends to join her on a madcap trip to the airport to declare her love for Ian, who wisely tells her that she’s being a fool and hops on the plane to Down Under. Jesse and his friend and roommate Sid (Suraj Sharma), Sid’s sister Ellen (Tien Tran), Sophie’s roommate Valentina (Francia Raisa), and her new British aristocratic lover Charlie (Tom Ainsley) are left to try to cheer Sophie up.

As in How I Met Your Mother, the series is introduced with the framing device of a parent, this time the mother (played by Kim Cattrall), in the year 2050, telling her offspring the exhaustive story of how she met their father and everyone she copulated with along the way. Cattrall is fun in her brief appearances in the show, but aside from Duff and Lowell, not many of the friend group cast really stand out. That might be due to the writing; the jokes are not so much lazy as non-existent, not that anyone told the laugh track, which explodes in guffaws at regular intervals.

The show is a direct descendant of its predecessor; Carter Bays and Craig Thomas get story credit for originating the story, and Sid’s apartment is the same one that Ted, Marshall and Lily lived in during the run of the original show, and Sid mentions that he got it from them. But new writer/showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger (Love, Victor, This is Us) don’t have the same comedic and romantic touch as Bays and Thomas. This being Hulu and not network television, though, they do allow the occasional curse word into the script.

It’s pretty obvious that we are supposed to root for Jesse to be the Father; his character has the most interesting back story (he went viral for proposing to his girlfriend on camera only to get denied), and he has been charming in other shows (like Veronica Mars), but showrunners are notorious for their romantic bait-and-switch tactics.

How I Met Your Mother was on the air for nine years, and its finale was a very polarizing one for fans, who felt that the show betrayed its very premise with an ending that tore apart a fan-favorite couple. It’s doubtful that for HIMYF – however many episodes it takes to get to the end of the story – that anyone will still care who ends up with whom.