What I Like About You (WB)
2002-2006

In days gone by, I would have clicked past What I Like About You almost as fast as my wrist's instantaneous darting to twist the dial on an FM station playing "Life Is A Highway." More like, "Life Is Too Precious To Waste On This Shit," you know?

But tonight, I happened upon WILAY, and was most pleasantly treated to the sight of Amanda Bynes and Jennie Garth in the same bed, and was immediately enamored. I'm unsure whether this change in mentality has to do with my ego-damaging unemployment, the ensuing excruciating loneliness, this undiagnosed growth behind my right ear that's starting to scare me shitless, or just a general sense of "giving up" as I get older. Well, whatever, let a dying man have his Amanda Bynes.

Garth & Bynes play Val & Holly, two beautiful sisters living in a beautiful NYC pad, hanging out with their other beautiful friends, attending beautiful colleges, having beautiful jobs, drinking beautiful drinks, beautiful etc. It's your prototypical 21st-century eye-candy sitcom, a more fluorescent Friends, more brightly lit, and with even better looking people wearing even tighter clothing.

They've got their requisite "fabulous" friends, including a black guy, a seemingly semi-retarded blonde, and a white guy. There's a decent amount of talk about sex, and the women spend most of their time talking about, and subsequently chasing, various boys. It's all fantasy, of course – you couldn't hook up the eight best-looking New York twenty- and thirtysomething trust-funders and come away with situations this fantastical. But at least it gave my dimming eyes thirty minutes of distraction away from my g'damned wall of 78 records that have nearly fell on me twice in the past year.

What I like about What I Like About You is that it is nothing like me. *Sob*

Review by Sergio Refresco © 2004