‘Nobody Wants This’ Wants Feeling Jewish to Be Enough

Spoilers ahead for “When Noah Met Joanne,” the season-two finale of Nobody Wants This.

In the first few minutes of the season-one finale of Nobody Wants This, Joanne (Kristen Bell) tells her friends that her sexy rabbi boyfriend, Noah (Adam Brody), “did ask me if I would ever consider converting, and I’m kind of open to it.” But by the episode’s last act, Joanne has realized that Noah can’t maintain his faith and be with her if she won’t commit to conversion. “You can’t have both, and I would never make you choose,” she tells him tearfully over the din of his niece Miriam’s bat mitzvah. And so she dumps him — it’s the most painless way to move forward — until the episode’s final two minutes, when the pair run back into each other’s arms once more. “You’re right,” Noah agrees. “I can’t have both.” They smooch, all but wordlessly cementing that, if forced to choose, he chooses her.

It’s the classic rom-com ending and a touching conclusion to an otherwise uneven season of television, which is perhaps why season two concludes the exact same way. Once again, Joanne and Noah are at a formal family event, Joanne’s sister Morgan’s (Justine Lupe) engagement party, and once again, the issue of conversion hangs over their heads. But this time it looms much larger: Joanne’s mother, Lynn (Stephanie Faracy), realized at a Purim party that she is Jewish deep down (classic thing to happen at Purim festivities) and wants to take classes to pursue conversion. If her mom can do it, why not Joanne? “I don’t want to be the person who’s asking you to be someone different,” Noah tells Joanne, initiating the conversation this time around. Once again, they make a cordial decision to separate and walk away tearfully. Once again, they reunite in the episode’s final minutes (Joanne runs into Noah’s arms this time). Once again, Noah recants that which he just said. “None of it matters,” he says. “You are my soulmate.”

It would be one thing if Nobody Wants This did the same thing twice as a comment on the corny predictability of modern rom-coms. But Noah’s realization in the finale follows season two’s most baffling scene: a long post-breakup conversation in which his sister-in-law Esther (Jackie Tohn) tells Joanne that she already “feels Jewish” to her. What does “feeling” Jewish mean? “Warm and cozy,” according to Esther. It’s “always wanting to chat about everything.” Esther even says that Joanne would be a “pretty good get” for Jews, as if to suggest there is a dearth of warmth and yapping in their world that Joanne could fill. It’s an odd counterpoint to Noah’s own journey this season, wherein he realizes how much being Jewish — in a traditional, observant way — actually means to him. When his synagogue passes him over for the lead rabbi position in favor of “Big Noah,” played by an underutilized Alex Karpovsky, (little) Noah has something of an existential crisis. He gets a new job at a much more relaxed synagogue (led by Seth Rogen and Kate Berlant, playing the world’s only carefree Jews) where he thinks he might be happy, but he isn’t. Traditions matter to him. That aspect of Judaism is important. To him, it’s about not just feeling Jewish but having a literal, tangible practice.

Overall, the second season of Nobody Wants This is less focused on how all Jews are crazy and more concerned with rules and traditions, in both love and religion, mostly to its benefit. For Noah, this plays out in his story line with the too-chill synagogue; for Joanne, it’s through her irritation that Noah doesn’t adhere to arbitrary relationship rules, like not getting her the same gift he got his ex for Valentine’s Day. (He probably shouldn’t do that, but also, a show about people dating in their 40s should not care so much about Valentine’s Day.) Part of what initially drew Joanne and Noah to each other was how their courtship seemed to break all the rules they once held dear. Now that they’ve forged ahead, creating new traditions with each other, the show abandons that completely in the finale. Noah changing his mind about Joanne for a second time is particularly egregious after he spent the whole season discovering how much having guidelines for how to live matters to him.

Of course, Noah never says any of this to Joanne in the finale. He has what amounts to a silent realization that she is his soulmate, but he does not in any way reckon with why her conversion mattered (matters?) so much to him. Would he be satisfied with Joanne simply feeling Jewish? And why does Esther get to be the arbiter of Jewishness during a crucial moment? That scene, too, is strangely out of character: In response to criticisms of antisemitism in the show’s first season, all of Esther’s edges have been worn down. It’s probably good that she’s no longer shrewish and spiteful, but at least she was funny when she was mean. Now the show has demoted her to a B- or C-plot sitcom character, lacking in sharpness and a consistent point of view. She has a crisis about whether or not she wants more children. She gets bangs. She gives an inspirational speech about how being Jewish can be anything — cue the America Ferrara Barbie speech here.

But can being Jewish be anything? If so, why is Nobody Wants This about being Jewish in the first place? Given that the show is based on Erin Foster’s life and that Foster herself did convert, it’s weird that the show repeatedly skirts around the seriousness of doing such a thing. Converting to a new religion is a strange and intense process for any person to go through, especially for a nonbeliever doing it for marriage or love or something in between, but the show displays only a superficial interest in that. The second season gets close to grappling with the weight of conversion when it comes to Joanne’s mother, whose decision to become Jewish feels borderline magical. The show doesn’t have to take her newfound faith seriously, but it chooses to; meanwhile, Joanne is left waiting — thinking, perhaps, that the same “aha!” moment will come for her. But it doesn’t. Does that mean she can’t convert? Characters in Nobody Wants This are constantly explaining Judaism to Joanne — during their climactic conversation, Esther has to define yenta for her — but we never see Joanne process that information. We have no idea what, if anything, any of this means to her. And now that the show has backed down from cultural differences between Jews and goys, there’s nothing left to talk about — or at least nothing worth ending a whole season on.

There are some bright spots dappled throughout the second season in scenes that mostly have nothing to do with religion whatsoever. Lupe remains the show’s strongest selling point — a deft comedic performer lending great pathos and charm to Morgan, who ought to be otherwise unbearable. Her romance with Dr. Andy (played by fellow Succession alum Arian Moayed) is played for laughs until it’s not. Isn’t it so funny and crazy that Morgan is dating her therapist? Maybe, but the show treats it the same as when Joanne started dating Noah: Everyone thinks this is bad, but maybe it’s good. That’s the ethos of the show, right? But it’s Morgan who winds up alone in the finale, and her whole arc feels strangely cruel in retrospect.

At its best, Nobody Wants This evokes You’re the Worst or even Happy Endings, shows about people who know and date each other and who all behave in varying degrees of weird to each other. You’re the Worst was similarly populated with shallow, depressed characters striving for purpose and love in a mean-spirited world, but it took these characters at their word — what they said and felt meant something. If being Jewish matters to Noah, we ought to know what that means. If “feeling Jewish” is suddenly a new metric for being Jewish, we ought to have a sense of where that comes from for Esther. It’s fine if Nobody Wants This wants to pivot away from being a story about conversion, but it needs to be brave enough to actually do so. Watching Joanne and Noah quite literally retrace their steps from the first finale makes all that happens in the second season feel that much more redundant. Nobody Wants This doesn’t need to find God to be good, but it ought to find something to fill the void at its core.