‘Nobody Wants This’ Review: Kristen Bell and Adam Brody Share Crackling Chemistry in Netflix’s Frustratingly Uneven Rom-Com
For many viewers, Netflix’s Nobody Wants This will be enjoyable simply as the very conventional, frequently likable rom-com that it is.
Sure, it’s extremely sitcom-y at every turn, but stars Kristen Bell and Adam Brody have an easy, instantly combustible chemistry that says, “In 2004 we were every smart TV fan’s favorite pair of snarky high schoolers and now, 20 years later, we’re ready to be treated like grown-ups and for everybody to remark upon how well we’ve aged.” Bell and Brody are accompanied by a supporting cast of veteran scene stealers, and creator Erin Foster has additionally given their tale a specificity that sets it apart from your average meet-cute about mismatched lovers.
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Specificity, however, brings its own set of responsibilities. It isn’t that I want to get caught up in “but is it good for the Jews?” internal monologuing, but if you’re me (and most of you, I must acknowledge, are not), it’s unavoidable. It’s here that engaging with Nobody Wants This becomes a more contentious thing.
As much as I’m inclined and predisposed to like any comedy in which the male romantic lead calls a love match “bashert,” in which celebrating the rituals of havdalah is treated like foreplay, in which gefilte fish jokes abound, Nobody Wants This leans as heavily into stereotypes as it does sitcom tropes. Occasionally it upends those pieces of too-familiar representation, but it just as frequently doesn’t.
While the series, which took admirable effort to cast Jewish actors in most of its key Jewish roles, never really becomes antisemitic itself, it definitely excuses shades of antisemitism as amusing character quirks.
Based to some degree on Foster’s real-life experiences — not the ones involving suddenly having Katharine McPhee as your stepmother — the rom-com features Bell as Joanne, who alternates between going out on disastrous first dates and recounting those disastrous first dates to her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) on their podcast, Nobody Wants This. (It’s a bad title for a podcast and a bad title for a TV series.) Those unfortunate outings are the key to the success of their show, which Joanne insists is about empowerment, but everybody else thinks is mostly about sex.
Nothing is worse for the podcast, then, than Joanne falling in love. But she does just that when she meets Noah (Brody). He’s fresh off his near-engagement to Rebecca (Emily Arlook), having realized that the relationship was what she wanted and what his family wanted and what everybody expected of him, but not what he actually desired.
Noah is witty and self-effacing and generally hunky and definitely not like any man Joanne has dated before, because he’s also a rabbi. But nothing is worse for a rabbi than falling in love with a shiksa, and Joanne is definitely that.
“Technically, it’s a Yiddish insult that means you’re impure and detestable, but these days it just means you’re a hot, blonde non-Jew,” Noah explains to Joanne.
“That’s actually a perfect description of me,” replies Joanne, who has no real spiritual system of her own and, despite living in Los Angeles, an obliviousness toward all things Jewish that is rather impressive.
Noah is a junior rabbi at what looks to be a fairly reform congregation. The senior position is in his grasp, but dating a non-Jew could be a hindrance. At least, it seems like it’s going to be an issue for his family, including his immigrant parents Bina (Tovah Feldshuh) and Ilan (Paul Ben-Victor). Noah’s goofy older brother Sasha (Timothy Simons) has no objections, but Sasha’s wife Esther (Jackie Tohn), one of Rebecca’s best friends, has enough resentment for the both of them.
Structurally, Nobody Wants This doesn’t do anything special. There were more than a few times when I wrote, “Are they really doing THIS tired plot?” True, being on Netflix allows a detour into a sex toy shop to be more graphic than if it were on, say, CBS. But flimsy farce is flimsy farce, and this show is content to be that with some regularity. Expect lots of too-predictable misunderstandings and miscommunications.
First weekend getaway goes astray? Check! Female lead gets the questionable advice that she needs to play harder to get and not throw herself at the man she’s beginning to love? Check! First meetings with various family members go embarrassingly wrong? Double check! The dialogue has a nice crackle and there are some semi-fresh ideas — I liked “The Ick,” to refer to that moment a new love does something small but odd that permanently alters the way you see them. But this is generally a much more conventional take than recent revisionist love stories like You’re the Worst or Colin from Accounts.
It’s the Jewish thing that gives Nobody Wants This its edge, and I could happily go through the myriad things the show does right, from an episode set at a Jewish summer camp to various tossed-off punchlines and details about religious underpinnings. When it comes to the stereotyping, there’s good-natured mockery of Noah’s basketball team, the Matzah Ballers, and his interactions with his boss (the always great Stephen Tobolowsky).
But there’s much less warmth to the treatment of Bina, who remains stuck in a single note that I’m afraid Feldshuh has played far too many times. Nobody is going to say that the “Jewish boys and their co-dependent relationships with their mothers” cliché is without some occasional truth, but it’s disheartening to have it treated this on the nose in 2024, and in such predictable contrast to the affection the series has for Ben-Victor’s Ilan.
The way that Jewishness plays as an impediment for this couple is, again, something that absolutely has a basis in some reality and specifically in Foster’s reality. After enough similar misadventures, though, they cease to feel like one person’s actual experiences and more like the accumulated experiences of a writers room.
The biggest victim of this excess is Joanne, whose general cluelessness about all things Jewish goes from seeming likably isolated to willfully ignorant in a hurry. As in, if you’re a podcast host dating a rabbi and he has taken the time to listen to your sex podcast, but you apparently haven’t so much as googled “What does a rabbi do?” the appeal is diminished. It’s one thing for her not to know what “shalom” means, and another for her not to know what “shabbat” is (one week after having, in the pilot, attended a Shabbat service at his temple). Or to bring a beautifully curated charcuterie plate to a family gathering, several weeks or maybe months into the relationship, without stopping to ask, “Is any of this pork?”
But all of those things? Maybe he’s not trying as much as he should either, but in all this time, how could she not have streamed Fiddler on the Roof out of basic curiosity? Were this disinterest a clear characterization choice, I might be OK with it, but it’s not.
Morgan might be worse, actually. While Joanne is probably just unaware on the page, Morgan may be actively antisemitic, delivering jokes about how Jews tend to look and having sex through sheets. Because Lupe is just ridiculously funny — especially for anybody making the contrast to her much more Jew-curious character in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel — and because she and Bell have great, cutting rapport, I laughed at some of these lines, but I never stopped feeling like there was a lot of charm-washing going on. Cast actresses 10 percent less endearing than Bell and Lupe and I’m pretty confident that Joanne and Morgan come across as bad people.
This goes both ways, mind you. One or two jokes about Joanne being a shiksa? Amusing and real! Ten or 15 jokes about Joanne being a shiksa? At that point, it’s a reminder that “shiksa” is, indeed, a slur and bullying is very rarely, in and of itself, funny. Do better by digging deeper!
But if you don’t dig deeper, you can just look at this as a love story in which one participant is sure of who they are and who they want to be and the other remains a work in progress. Simple, but reliable stuff. Stripped of caring about the specificity, you can just relish watching Brody and Bell flirt for 10 half-hour episodes, which they do delightfully.
The back-and-forth between Sasha and Morgan, especially once they realize that they’re each the “loser sibling” in their respective families, is a reliable source of laughs as well — though the narrative rushes to put the characters into what I’ll only suggest should have been a season three or four position. As stealth MVPs go, Shiloh Bearman stands out because her character, Sasha and Esther’s bat mitzvah-aged daughter, has separate scenes with Joanne, Sasha and Esther that humanize each character.
I wish the series could have gotten more use out of Sherry Cola as Joanne and Morgan’s podcasting colleague, both because of how hilarious Cola was in Joy Ride and because the podcasting part of the story is really, really thin.
That plotline is just one of many places Nobody Wants This has room to grow in a second season that I’d still love to see, despite my reservations. In response to the show’s title, it isn’t that I don’t want this. I actually want this badly. But to reference a completely unconnected rom-com … it’s complicated.
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