Netflix Hit Back, but Not Better

When Erin Foster’s Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This premiered last year, I discussed it through one of my favorite prisms: Is it good for the Jews?

My answer was a mixed “Yes.” The first season, in which a rabbi (Adam Brody‘s Noah) falls for a shiksa podcaster (Kristen Bell‘s Joanne) — “shiksa” being the show’s oft-repeated preferred slur, not mine — aimed for laughter and swooning, but simultaneously took a serious-minded approach to interfaith relationships and a specific and detailed approach to Judaism. I appreciated that effort, especially in a television landscape in which any expression of religion, much less Jewishness, is decidedly rare.

I still expressed serious concerns about the show’s lack of generosity toward its Jewish female characters — particularly Tovah Feldshuh’s Bina and Jackie Tohn’s Esther — and I was perplexed by why both Joanne and her sister/podcast partner Morgan’s (Justine Lupe) lack of knowledge or curiosity about Jewishness so frequently resembled playful antisemitism. 

Was the show itself also, you know, good? Well, my answer was similarly a mixed “Yes.” The appeal of Nobody Wants This hinged primarily on the chemistry between Bell and Brody, which isn’t uncommon for a rom-com. That the chemistry was palpable helped Nobody Wants This overcome its predictable reliance on genre clichés, while the supporting cast, especially Timothy Simons, Lupe and Tohn, helped elevate underwritten roles (though with Lupe’s performance, I was stuck pondering uncomfortable questions like, “If an actor is so charming that she makes you ignore that her character borders on antisemitic … is that GOOD?”)

Anyway, the show was a sensation, earning Golden Globe and Emmy nominations and reminding Hollywood pencil-pushers that the appetite for a proficiently made rom-com very much exists.

The second season of Nobody Wants This, then, is a reminder of why television prefers, whenever possible, to give its rom-coms a procedural coating. Moonlighting? A mystery-of-the-week procedural (but really, at its best, a rom-com). Castle? A mystery-of-the-week procedural (but really, at its best, a rom-com). Bones? A mystery-of-the-week procedural (but really, at its best, a rom-com). It just helps for your characters to have other things to do in addition to falling in and out of love. Otherwise, a distinct risk of repetition and exhaustion sets in.

Nobody Wants This doesn’t fall off a creative cliff in its second season, but a lot of the charm is diminished. The new creative team takes evident pains to adjust some of the character-based problems from the first season, but in the process of expanding the profile for several supporting players, Brody and Bell are left playing often identical beats of uncertainty and insecurity to the ones that worked well in the first season. In the process, the chemistry and overall appeal dwindle dramatically.

The new season, boasting Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan as new showrunners, picks up fairly soon after the first — though time generally doesn’t matter much in the world of Nobody Wants This, except for when people want to complain about things being “too soon” or “too slow.” 

Noah and Joanne are basically living together, except for when the show wants to remind us of Joanne’s insecurity that they’re not formally living together. The whole “Joanne isn’t sure she’s ready to convert to Judaism” thing remains their primary bone of contention, though the writers give Noah a contrived professional crisis so that they have things to talk about other than why Joanne can’t commit to converting or not converting.

Adding to the rom-com hijinks are extended storylines with Simons’ Sasha, whose professional life has vanished entirely along with father Ilan (Paul Ben-Victor, almost totally absent); Esther hitting bumpy patches; and Morgan embarking on a romance with Dr. Andy (Arian Moayed), an accelerated love story that Joanne disapproves of but the show seems to find amusing rather than ultra-disturbing given its origins. We spend more time with Joanne and Morgan’s parents (Stephanie Faracy’s Lynn and Michael Hitchcock’s Henry).

The season premiere, written by Foster and featuring the return of Noah’s rec league basketball team, again positions Feldshuh’s Bina, frequently my biggest source of discomfort in the first season, as an ongoing adversary. Then she nearly vanishes in the second half of the season, which is one way of dodging the Jewish mom stereotyping.

Another way is to write characters out of a maternal role, like Esther, whose teenage daughter has become invisible (figuratively), allowing Esther to concentrate on more important things like getting bangs and waffling on whether or not she’s jealous of Sasha and Morgan’s friendship. Esther’s still a little mean this season, but she’s playfully mean and makes no effort to break Joanne and Noah up, so we can like her without complication. As for Morgan — still my most consistent source of laughs — giving her a relationship of her own, however bad that relationship is, makes her less prone to saying dumb things about Jewishness.

Thus, Esther and Morgan become less problematic characters and Bina becomes a frequently mentioned but less frequently seen afterthought. That’s a way of fixing those problems! 

But new problems arrive with Noah and Joanne. In the first season, Noah was perhaps over-idealized, to a point at which it was hard to feel like the generally superficial and dithering Joanne was on his level. This season turns Noah into a smarmier, borderline sociopathic character — far more like Joe from Netflix’s You than anybody is likely to want to admit — whose condescension often became insufferable for me. I’d say I sympathized more with Joanne, but it’s almost like the writers realized that despite her being based on the series creator, she had no specific personality traits, so scripts are constantly trying to over-explain her limited eccentricities.

An episode featuring Brody’s real-life wife Leighton Meester tries to fill in some backstory blanks, as does an episode that spells out how Joanne’s parents’ divorce impacted her. But people kept making pronouncements about Joanne’s personality and I kept responding with, “Huh?” Plus, somehow Joanne and Morgan’s podcast is less plausible and less purposeful than it was last season.

There are still times that Brody and Bell generate some sweetness, but the heat and crackle between them is missing — by choice a lot of the time, but far from all of it. The entire first season sold the premise, “These two characters absolutely belong together, no matter the obstacles.” This season builds to a nearly identical finale decision and I was hard-pressed to care.

The vagueness extends to the season’s perspective on Judaism, which is simultaneously more and less. 

The season is very invested in exploring Jewishness as a way of processing the world, which of course it is, more than as a “religion,” which of course it is for many people. At the same time, Nobody’s Wants This becomes like the rom-com version of one of those high school-set shows in which the book they’re studying any particular week ties in directly to the theme of the episode. Noah is constantly making sermons or toasts cribbed from Talmud for Netflix Subscribers. Then again, there’s a full Purim episode, so I shouldn’t quibble.

My biggest regret of the entire season is the lack of a return cameo from Leslie Grossman’s Rabbi Shira, whose lone episode last season represented one of its most meaningful spiritual moments. Sending up the no-stakes frivolity of progressive Reform Judaism, characters played by Seth Rogen and Kate Berlant get some insight-free chuckles. Plus, bringing in Rogen forces comparisons to Platonic, which had a tighter, funnier second season and emerged as a better “Los Angeles” show.

Or maybe Nobody Wants This just requires a mulligan after the creative overhaul of the second season. Reading THR‘s cover story after watching the season and writing most of this review, I find it amazing that the first season worked as well as it did and wholly unsurprising that the second season doesn’t seem as secure in who these people are or what their story is. Maybe season three will be what I actually want.