For Wil Calhoun, the road not taken would have smelled much worse.

A 1984 Louisiana State University grad, Calhoun is currently creator and executive producer of the WB sitcom "What I Like About You," which debuts at 7 tonight on WNOL-Channel 38.

As such, he works with TV stars such as Jennie Garth (Fox's "Beverly Hills 90210") and Amanda Bynes (Nickelodeon's "All That" and "The Amanda Show").

That's better by a lot than the cast of characters he would've been working with if he hadn't had a major career crisis as he neared his college graduation.

A Baton Rouge native and drama buff in high school, Calhoun entered LSU as a speech major, but drifted.

"I almost got a degree in dairy science," he said.

Treading the boards to boarding bovines. How does something like that happen to a person?

"I read James Herriot's book ‘All Creatures Great and Small' and said, ‘I want to be a vet,' " said Calhoun, 43, during a recent telephone interview. "But then I discovered that you have to be good in math and good in chemistry to be a vet.

"I had taken a class in dairy science and liked it. It was hands-on with the animals. You got to live on a dairy farm in a bunkhouse with the other guys. It was a completely different life.

"I think what was happening was that I was acting a role, as a cowboy."

It was a part he played well.

"I almost got my degree," he said. "When I was a couple of semesters away from graduating, I sort of had this epiphany: ‘I don't have cows. What am I going to do?' "

To-ga! To-ga! To-ga!

No.

"He came into my office and said he'd just been out in a field staring at some cows and crying," said John Dennis, a professor in the LSU Department of Theater. "He's so sensitive."

Realizing that his dairy direction had been a terrible mistake, Calhoun changed his major and started taking acting courses.

"I was like, ‘This is what I'm supposed to do,' " Calhoun said. "Luckily, I was not ready to get out of college, so changing my major added two years of college time.

"I was like, ‘Great! More time in college is fine with me.' "

Upon graduation in 1984, Calhoun moved to Los Angeles to pursue work as an actor.

On his third day in town, he and a friend crashed a party. There, Calhoun met a woman. She was a flight attendant. He was a guy who wanted to be an actor, of which there is no shortage in Los Angeles.

"I was wearing crappy clothes and driving a crappy car," he said. "She just sort of, like, ran."

Still, Calhoun knew that something about his life had changed.

"I told my friend, not tongue-in-cheek, ‘That's the woman I'm going to marry,' " he said of Taryn, whom he eventually, in fact, married.

As an actor, Calhoun scored a couple of guest roles on "MacGyver," and did a few commercials.

"It was a little bit of dough, but not a lot," he said. "It was a little discouraging."

Wil and Taryn moved to Chicago so he could "get back into the theater scene," he said, but that also proved "very hard to break into."

Though Calhoun today is self-deprecating about his acting years, professor Dennis, who directed him in LSU productions, said his student had genuine thespian talent.

"He was very good," he said. "He did realism very well. He just never wanted to do anything that might be false or ring untrue. He didn't want to do any junk up there.

"His writing is like that, too."

Hey. Foreshadowing. Cool.

Frustrated by his lack of progress as an actor, Calhoun sat down to write something he could perform himself.

"It just came pouring out of me," Calhoun said. "It had been dammed up, I guess. I needed a creative outlet. In acting, so many people can dictate whether or not you're going to work. In writing it was, ‘I can work today if I want. People may not want to see it, but I can work.' "

Soon he composed a play titled "The Balcony Scene," which Dennis described as a romantic comedy about an agoraphobic apartment-dweller who falls in love, balcony-to-balcony, with his next- door neighbor.

"The characters slowly evolve," said Dennis. "There's always love in Wil's work. No matter what else happens, there's always caring.

"It's a lovely play."

"The Balcony Scene" was produced in Los Angeles, off-Broadway and (in its first production off the coasts) at LSU, and is still frequently performed today by theater troupes around the country.

At about the same time Calhoun found success as a playwright, he and Taryn produced a daughter, Bren, and Calhoun's agent suggested that TV writing might provide a better living for his client's young family.

So Calhoun went to work writing for the tube, first on a short-lived sitcom titled "Pride & Joy." Later credits include "If Not for You," "Caroline in the City" and "Jesse."

Also a little NBC show called "Friends."

By the time Calhoun joined the "Friends" writing staff in 1994, it was already a huge TV hit.

No, it was a cultural tsunami.

"It was like a rocket," said Calhoun of the comparison between his previous TV work and being inside the "Friends" phenomenon. "It was night and day.

"People would ask what I do. I'd say, ‘I write for television.' They'd say, ‘What show?' I'd say, ‘Pride and Joy.' They'd sort of look at you with a blank face.

"If you're sitting on an airplane and someone asks what you do and you say, ‘Have you ever seen ‘Friends'? -- it's just like this explosion. It can be good or bad. It's bizarre.

"People feel like they own it."

Though episodic TV is primarily a collaborative art form, Calhoun was credited as the main writer on nine "Friends" episodes during his time with the show, including "The One With the Jam," "The One With the Dollhouse," "The One With Joey's Dirty Day" and "The One With All the Kissing."

Though those titles likely mean more to cultists than casual viewers, "Friends" is "a wonderful pedigree," said Mike Clements, co-senior vice president of comedy for the WB. "Wil's been involved with arguably the most successful sitcom of all time. He's responsible for many wonderful episodes of that show. You look at a list of the episodes he wrote -- you remember those and you laugh out loud at them. They're very memorable."

Calhoun's rise at "Friends" eventually took him to the title of show runner (or supervising executive producer), one of the most demanding and prestigious jobs in TV production.

"The bar on that show is set very high," Calhoun said. "We were constantly struggling to maintain the level of quality. To a large degree we were successful.

"To be the funniest show on television and tell great stories -- it was very, very difficult."

It helped, of course, to work with such a talented cast.

"Sometimes if you picked up a script and read it, I think nine out of 10 people would say, ‘That's not funny,' " Calhoun said. "The actors bring so much to their characters. They know their characters so well -- extremely talented, extremely funny." Calhoun said he's sensing the same vibe from the principal actors on his current show, a family comedy starring Garth as a young single woman whose even younger sister, played by Bynes, moves in.

The comedy is broad and physical and frequently silly, but observers inside and outside the WB sense pending success for "What I Like About You," given Garth's comic skills and Bynes' built-in audience of kids who literally grew up watching her Nickelodeon work.

"Jennie is terrific," said Calhoun. "I've told her, and I hope she doesn't mind that I say this, but there's something very Jennifer Aniston-ish-y about her. To me, she's beautiful, she's funny, her comedy is very grounded in reality.

"With both girls, there's just sort of this star quality. It's the same thing I felt when I was onstage at ‘Friends.' They are special people."

Same goes for Calhoun, said the WB's Clements.

"The key to Wil is that he's not only a wonderful writer in his own right, but he's also a very level-headed and nurturing guy with very little ego," he said.

Calhoun, who finances a scholarship for LSU's theater program and was selected the school's Young Alum of the Year in 2001, returns often to Baton Rouge.

It's the cows, calling him home.

No.

"Most of my family still lives there," he said. "It's a college town. It feels very young and very energetic. I love driving up and down Highland Road. I love looking at the beautiful homes.

"I love that people still talk to each other in the grocery stores. There is a pace of life there that suits me. I think my blood pressure goes down to normal as soon as I arrive."