Kristen Bell and Adam Brody in a romantic comedy? Everybody wants this, especially millennial women who, approximately two decades ago, found a feminist avatar in Bell’s performance as Veronica Mars’ titular teen detective and an ideal crush object in Brody’s portrayal of the sensitive Seth Cohen on the quintessential mid-aughts teen soap, The O.C. Both actors are charming—while she excels at screwball banter, he radiates laid-back confidence—and their onscreen chemistry could make even the most poorly executed rom-com worth watching.
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In that regard, Nobody Wants This, whose 10-episode first season is streaming on Netflix, turned out better than it needed to be. The angle is interfaith romance. A blonde agnostic of Christian descent, Bell’s Joanne has a chaotic dating life and overshares about it in a raunchy podcast à la Call Her Daddy. When she meets “hot rabbi” Noah (Brody) at a dinner party, he has just broken it off with a longtime girlfriend (Emily Arlook’s Rebecca) who got so impatient for him to propose, she simply hunted down the engagement ring he was saving until he was certain he wanted to marry her and put it on her own finger. A will-they-won’t-they ensues—one that, while breezily watchable, feels short on insight into the realities of Jewish-gentile relationships in the 21st century, despite taking inspiration from creator Erin Foster’s courtship with her Jewish husband.
The series takes pains to establish that although they are upper-middle-class white people of roughly the same age with families based in Los Angeles, its leads come from disparate worlds. Joanne is, in a word, messy. Jaded, unfiltered, and prone to swiping right on the worst guys available, she’s the ideal co-host for the fast-rising chat show, also titled Nobody Wants This, that she makes with her younger sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe, a.k.a. Succession’s Willa). Ever since the girls’ dad (Michael Hitchcock) came out as gay, their parents have been separated but also inseparable, in part because their flighty mom (Stephanie Faracy) is still in love with him.
Noah lives the quieter life you might expect of a spiritual leader—though he also smokes weed and engages in casual sex and does other things of which his aging boss, Rabbi Cohen (Stephen Tobolowsky), would not approve. His parents, Bina (Tovah Feldshuh) and Ilan (Paul Ben-Victor), are Eastern European immigrants with a self-made fortune and the stiff demeanor of characters at least a generation older; Bina is so repressed, she can’t even say the word sex. Noah’s obnoxious yet loyal older brother Sasha (the hilarious Veep alum Timothy Simons) is married to Rebecca’s ball-busting best friend, Esther (Jackie Tohn from GLOW), which makes the couple just one obstacle standing in the way of Joanne and Noah’s happily ever after.
But the real problem, for Joanne, is that she’s an outsider among the unfeasibly insular Jewish community that has until now dominated his life. Parents at shul, looking to set up their adult daughters with the rabbi, are scandalized to see the shiksa he’s dating at a service. Rabbi Cohen warns him that if he wants the big promotion he’s up for, he’ll have to give up that “nice blonde crab cake” he’s dating. This is all believable enough within the context of Noah’s vocation. What feels less realistic, considering how cool and easygoing he’s supposed to be, is the homogeneity of his personal life. All of his friends seem to be Jewish couples who are loyal to Rebecca. He and Sasha play on a recreational basketball team called the Matzah Ballers.
There’s a fine line between exploring Jewish identity and essentializing it, and Foster (who converted) sometimes crosses into dubious territory. Noah’s ruminations on theology and tradition can be lovely, and they feel true to his pensive character. But when Esther sends Sasha to the schvitz, where his dad spends all day every Sunday, to request a promotion at the family company, so that she can print his impressive new title on their daughter’s bat mitzvah announcement? It starts to seem as though nothing ever happens with Noah or his family that isn’t explicitly about being Jewish. Meanwhile, unlike just about any real person of her generation raised in a major metropolis, Joanne has never so much as heard the word shalom.
As the season progresses, it becomes more and more palpable that Nobody Wants This is contorting reality to lend stakes to the question of whether Joanne and Noah can make it work. (In my elder-millennial experience, interfaith couples are more common than not. I’m in one. It is the opposite of a big deal.) In doing so, the series engages in some unfortunate stereotypes. The Jewish men we meet are henpecked to the max, and their wives have the sharpest of beaks—not to mention a deep-seated loathing for the delicate-featured shiksas these guys can’t help gawking at. Do we really need a B-plot where Morgan and Sasha surreptitiously flirt?
And yet, for all its absurdity, Nobody Wants This is almost always a pleasure to watch. The dialogue is quippy without being overwritten. When Esther tells Joanne she’s been writing mean reviews of her podcast, Joanne chirps, “Every review is an engagement, so thank you.” When Joanne tells her family she’s considering whether to convert to Judaism, her father exclaims “That’s fun!” as though she’s contemplating a girls’ trip. Her pal Ryann (D’Arcy Carden) weighs in on the same dilemma: “Just… be Jewish. It’s not like you stand for things.” An especially fun episode takes the couple to a Jewish summer camp, where the teen girls all have crushes on Noah.
It doesn’t hurt that the cast is so likable. Comedy stalwarts like Carden, Simons, Tohn, Faracy, Tobolowsky, and Sherry Cola (Joy Ride, Good Trouble), the raspy-voiced scene stealer who plays the mutual friend who brings Noah and Joanne together, keep the mood light. Feldshuh’s Bina, in all her delusional narcissism, has an unlikely charisma. Lupe makes an excellent foil for Bell, their fractious bond deepened by decades of sibling rivalry and the threat Joanne’s new relationship with a decent guy poses to a podcast dependent on her dating woes. And even if the whole opposites-attract setup can read as artificial, the warmth between Bell and Brody feels exhilaratingly real. You just want to see them banter and kiss and snuggle and thrive. Implausible as it can be in terms of interfaith representation, through sheer chemistry and chutzpah, Nobody Wants This earns enough goodwill to merit another attempt in Season 2.
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