# 217 – Friends With Benefits (TV-show special)

I chose to do this post because I actually thought it would be funny to have two Friends With Benefits posts in a row. The previous one (# 216) was basically a movie that told the story of two friends who shared benefits and then fell in love. Also similar to the Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher movie Friends With Benefits the TV-show is like the more sexier version of Friends or How I Met Your Mother. Basically it is a show about friends and it focuses on the relationships they have between others and with each other.

It seems that the series has 13 episodes (while the last is only available on iTunes) and that is all you can get from these characters which I actually found appealing in some situations. The show was cancelled (at least that’s the info I got) and I’m not really surprised cause a lot of shows don’t make it after the first season if they don’t have a big impact. Comparing Friends With Benefits with Happy Endings (which got cancelled and then was picked up again) it is quite clear why Friends With Benefits got the boot.

My opinion is the following, Friends With Benefits never established the characters that viewers can relate to in a more universal way. They were all too similar, all had these social-characteristics that kept them single and nobody was in a relationship longer than an episode. I find it just too shallow for this type of a show while Happy Endings got much more depth to it. But maybe I just like to compare it to Friends cause I just watched them the other day – oh the memories.That was a comedy that everybody could relate to and it didn’t seem as light as FWB.

Anyway, Daneel Ackles and Ryan Hansen are more familiar names in this show: Ackles, who was then called Harris played Rachel in One Tree Hill and Hansen was the popular boy in Veronica Mars. Others, Zach Cregger, Andre Holland and Jessica Lucas were basically new faces for me. Although Cregger is behind a show called The Whitest Kids U’know which he directs/writes/acts in and Lucas has played in many TV-shows I watch.

Other than that I quite recommend it if you have nothing else to watch and you need some good laughs, cause it has a 6,2 score on IMDb which is okay but not great. Now we just have to wait and see what other new ways to portray friends with benefits somebody comes up with – to be continued.