LOS ANGELES -- A strange thing happened at Monday night's Paley Festival panel for "How I Met Your Mother": Barney didn't suit up.

Fellow stars Josh Radnor and Jason Segel, as well as series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, were all dressed up for the occasion. But Neil Patrick Harris, who plays the suit-loving Barney, opted instead for a jeans-sweater-jacket combination.

"I felt kind of bad about it," Harris said afterward as he signed autographs for fans. "But I wear suits a lot on this show."

Otherwise, the Museum of Television & Radio event went pretty much as you'd expect -- which is to say, it was funny.

Josh Radnor, who plays Ted, the guy trying to meet his future kids' mother, was describing the reaction he gets from fans of the show. Not too surprisingly, they all want to know if he knows who the mother is.

"I don't know if they want me to say it's an accountant from New Jersey that I meet in season five, or it's Keira Knightley," Radnor says. There's a pause, and he turns to Thomas and Bays: "Hey ... ."

Although "How I Met Your Mother" looks pretty much like a traditional, multi-camera sitcom on screen, it doesn't work that way. The show doesn't shoot before a live audience; instead, it films an episode over three days, then plays a finished show to an audience to record the laughs home viewers hear.

That's done partly out of necessity: "How I Met Your Mother" has a lot more scenes than your average sitcom, and its flashback structure makes for lots of jumping around in places and times. But as the season has worn on, cast and crew say, they've grown to love this way of working.

"Intimacy is a big part of it," Bays says. "There's something very genuine about just trying to make your friends laugh."

Pamela Fryman, who's directed every episode of the show, doesn't think shooting in front of an audience would add anything to the show. "We trust each other, we know what works," she says. "It's an incredibly honest way to work."

"And as a result," adds Thomas, "these guys got to act and stuff. We can have quieter moments in the show. It's not just all insult-comeback, insult-comeback."

Fans and critics were taken aback at the end of the first episode, when Future Ted (voiced by Bob Saget) revealed that Robin (Cobie Smulders), the girl he instantly fell for, was not, in fact, the woman he married. To the creators, though, that's the beauty of the story.

"It's torturous that they're not together," Bays says of Ted and Robin. "But that's one of the things we like. Our frustration that they can't play a married couple is very real."

Thomas also says to have Ted meet his future wife 20 minutes into a series wouldn't have rung true. "We thought it would be cheap," he says, "if it's a pilot about meeting the love of your life and it's, 'I went down to the bar, and there she was.'"