Actor Adam Brody won a Critics’ Choice Award earlier this year for his role as ‘hot rabbiRoklov, who became a worthy Jewish successor to Andrew Scott’s on social media hot priest (Flea bag). For millennials, Brody and his co-star Kristen Bell as Joanne were a dream couple: they both broke through in their twenties in a teen series, he in The O.C and she in Veronica Marsand now the two of them stood in the spotlight again, over forty but still just as handsome.
Brody’s character in particular struck a chord. Noah Roklov is a pretty ideal man: religious but not rigid, empathetic, funny, sincere in his intentions and always busy with his parents and his brother, because family comes first. He makes it clear to Joanne almost immediately that he wants to continue with her, even if she is not Jewish – he hopes that she will convert.
Joanne doesn’t know this kind of righteousness. She is suspicious, weak from years of being “on the apps” and seeing relationships fail. Her parents used to make a mess at home, her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe, the blonde from Succession) is divorced and cynical to the core. The dynamic in the Williams home is one of bickering and banter, although they hang out together all the time; Joanne and Morgan make a podcast together about sex and relationships, and are also constantly criticizing each other behind the microphone.
Joanne and Morgan are the alter egos of two real sisters: writer Erin and producer Sara Foster, just as blonde, just as quintessentially LA. The Fosters have been working together for about a decade, have a clothing brand and have been chatting since 2021 The World’s First Podcast full of… well, everything. No detail of their lives remains undiscussed. Nobody Wants This is the TV version of Erin’s love story: as a battle-weary bachelor, she met a Jewish man in 2018 who may not have been a rabbi, but who, as a child of Russian refugees, took his faith very seriously. Just like in the series, the love between them was as immediate as it was complicated.
Kristen Bell and Justine Lupe.
Photo Erin Simkin/Netflix
Correction after criticism
The hastily ordered second season by Netflix Nobody Wants This further explores the relationship between Noah and Joanne, at a slower pace full of side paths, and in passing corrects the criticism that was also leveled at the first season: Noah’s religion was depicted correctly and carefully (a rabbi was consulted behind the scenes, and Brody, who calls himself a non-believing Jew, read a stack of books in preparation), but the Jewish female characters were found by some to be too bitchy and too one-dimensional.
Noah’s mother and sister-in-law are still not the types you want to argue with in season two, but their initial, categorical rejection of ‘posh’ Joanne (“Nowadays that just means a sexy, blonde non-Jew,” according to Noah) slowly wears away. Sister-in-law Esther (Jackie Tohn) in particular gets more relief – from a bickering matrône she changes into a woman who married so young that she is young forties yearns for freedom. Tohn plays this quite well, but she is also less memorable.
The most entertaining new developments are for men. Rabbi Noah discovers the limits of his good: on Valentine’s Day he so compulsively ticks off ‘romantic’ gestures that it becomes fake, a performance. His brother Sasha (Timothy Simons) dresses up for Purim (“Jewish Halloween”) as the least believable gangster ever – too sweet and too clumsy. And then there is Doctor Andy, a wonderful supporting role by Arian Moayed (also from Succession): an unadulterated one love bomberwho, as a therapist, violates all ethical boundaries by establishing relationships with his female patients. That sounds creepy, but here it’s especially funny.
There are no really dire problems Nobody Wants This; the world news is far away and everyone has plenty of time and money to make up after an argument, in always new outfits, with a drink. If Netflix signs up again for more, writer Erin Foster still has plenty of stories: she has now converted to Judaism, married her ‘Noah’ and gave birth to a daughter after a long IVF process. Foster’s ambition, like a modern-day Nora Ephron, is to make the romkom again a permanent part of our viewing menu. In stressful times like these there is nothing wrong with that.
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