Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Nobody Wants This brings Kristen Bell and Adam Brody together in an onscreen romantic relationship.
Nobody Wants This: Season 1
Television has created a new kind of purgatory. Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, about a podcaster who falls for a rabbi, isn’t quite a sitcom and isn’t quite a romcom. It feels like a limited series, and yet ends without resolution. Created by Erin Foster, it flourishes thanks to the irresistible chemistry between its leads Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. They play out a relationship that’s disarmingly passionate but grounded, too, in how giddy yet unhurried their first sparks of attraction are.
Bell’s Joanne is someone you’d probably describe as agnostic, whose now-separated parents, Henry (Michael Hitchcock) and Lynn (Stephanie Faracy), never talked openly about faith, in either the embrace or the absence of it. As Joanne’s producer, Ashley (Joy Ride’s deeply charismatic Sherry Cola, here woefully underused), points out, “there’s not a Jewish bone in her body”.
That’s a little bit of a problem because, while Brody’s Noah has no issues with an interfaith relationship, his position as rabbi has put him at the head of a community whose older members lean toward the traditional, conservative side. Any serious commitment to Joanne might put his career, and life’s passion, at stake.
Foster approaches the conflict from a place of experience. She converted to Judaism for her partner, and can understand the subtleties and complications at play. Yet, Nobody Wants This is also intent on drawing out the kind of broad lines we’d typically associate with mainstream romcoms. So, it’s not merely a series about religion, but about a cynical, forthright woman afraid to be vulnerable. This part isn’t handled so well. It’s established that, partially due to the demands of her podcast, which she records alongside her sister Morgan (Succession’s Justine Lupe), Joanne’s been quick to find a man’s faults, and quick to move on.
It’s a necessary schtick. A date is really a potential anecdote. And, supposedly, Joanne doesn’t have the best taste in men. Yet, we don’t see much of this side of her personality. In fact, she’s far from superficial, and expresses frustration that the companies intent on acquiring her and Morgan’s podcast, also named Nobody Wants This, refuse to see it like her as a “textbook example of fourth-wave feminism” (a debatable claim, but let’s move on). She wants her work to be about more than bad sex stories.
Really, there’s very little messy about her. She does, at one point, turn up to a recording having not read the book, or even done a cursory Google on, her interview subject. I’d argue that’s a little incompetent. But show doesn’t even present this as a quirk. Instead, she’s extremely self-possessed and funny, has an immaculate home and a perfect blowout. So, that makes it a little odd when she whips out one of those clichéd manic pixie dream girl speeches, where she tells Noah that “sometimes I do weird shit, and I can be impulsive and obsessive”, and that if they want to date, he’ll have to accept “all of her crazy”. What crazy? I guess that’s a romcom staple, these days.
Yet, episode by episode, beat by beat, Nobody Wants This relies on the sitcom framework. There’s always some awkward, unexpected encounter—once at a sex shop, then at a summer camp—and always some storyline involving crossed wires and miscommunication, in which everything is neatly resolved within a twenty-minute runtime.
And while Nobody Wants This is sweet, and sporadically very funny, thanks partially to quiet MVP Timothy Simons as Noah’s brother Sasha, it’s also a little frustrating at times. Joanne and Noah make for a great onscreen couple, but the series feels constantly torn between different tones and ideas. It can’t quite decide whether the focus is entirely on Joanne and Noah, or whether we should invest ourselves in the rest of the crew.
Joanne’s family unit is tender, but fragile. Henry discovered his sexuality late in life, and is trying now to reacquaint himself with the world as a gay man, while Lynn struggles to shake her unresolved, romantic attachment. Morgan and Sasha start to talk, which becomes a source of jealousy for the latter’s wife, Esther (Jackie Tohn). But, because Nobody Wants This isn’t quite a sitcom, these people aren’t given much room to breathe. All we get are snippets of emotions, snatched conversations. Noah’s mother, Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), never stretches far beyond the trope of controlling matriarch.
Joanne herself feels a little shortchanged, even. While the series is sincere and direct when it comes to Judaism, and it’s moving to hear Noah discuss his faith, with “wrestling with what God is or isn’t, not knowing”, she never really undergoes that same level of self-interrogation. She makes decisions about faith, but we’re not invited to understand how she feels about those decisions.
Of course, these are all ideas that could be expanded on and explored in a future season. It took a while, after all, to really latch onto the characters of Parks and Recreation or New Girl. But while Nobody Wants This certainly sets up a return, it’s also burned through such a tremendous amount of story that I’m not particularly convinced Foster and her team are in it for the long haul. So, I guess that means it isn’t a sitcom. And not a limited series. But, not quite a romcom? I’m still confused.
