“The Priestly”: Tim Hortons Makes a Fictitious Donut Real

Take a look at these scenes from Monday’s over-the-top Canada-themed episode of the TV series How I Met Your Mother. If you’re Canadian, the only things you really need to know about the show to understand these scenes is:

• One of the characters on the show is Robin Scherbatsky (played by Cobie Smulders, who also played S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill in the Avengers movie), a Canadian who as a teenager was a pop star performing under the name “Robin Sparkles”. She had a hit single called Let’s Go to the Mall. She later tried to distance herself by going grunge and wrote a song about how she stalked a well-known Canadian celebrity. If this reminds you of one Alanis Morrissette, give yourself a Timbit!
• Barney (played by Neil Patrick Harris) is her fiance, and upon hearing about the stalker song, travels up to Vancouver to conduct interviews of all her former boyfriends at a Tim Hortons.

Pay particular attention to the final interview segment in the Behind the Music parody, where several Canadian celebrities are interviewed. The time when “Robin Sparkles lost it” was such a shocking moment for Canada that every Canadian remembers not only which Tim Horton’s they were in when it happened, but what donut they were eating:

In the final interview segment, Jason Priestley says that when Robin lost it, he was in “Squamish, British Columbia. Crammed a Timbit into a strawberry vanilla [donut] and invented ‘The Priestley’. Should’a been the best day of my life.”

Very soon afterwards, Tim Horton’s announced a miracle:

According to this article, The Priestly was created within 24 hours after the airing of the episode and was the result of the cooperation between Tim Hortons’ quick-thinking marketing department and their R&D department.

(My first thought after reading that was: Tim Hortons has an R&D department? Awesome.)

I look forward to being able to purchase a Priestley at my local Tim Hortons — I live an equal distance between two of them — in the near future. For inspired and tasty comedy, I salute Tim Hortons with a Priestley on a flaming sword!

And now…Let’s Go to the Mall! (I love the “Brian Mulroney” cameo.)