Nobody Wants This Delivers on That Name

About halfway through the first season of Nobody Wants This, creator Erin Foster’s rom-com that premieres Sept. 26 on Netflix, Kristen Bell’s Joanne—a sex podcaster with a habit of making bad relationship decisions—decides it’s a good decision to explain the nuances of adult dating to a group of bat mitzvah-aged teens.

This impromptu counseling session—one of many things in this show that nobody wants or asks for—happens a few moments after the man they all more-or-less refer to as “hot rabbi” (Adam Brody’s Noah) introduces Joanne to another adult as his “friend.” 

The joke is supposed to be that Joanne and Noah’s relationship is just the grown-up version of the one that’s perplexing these kids; Noah hides Joanne away from the people closest to him, the heartbroken teen is made to go on dates at a supermarket.

The joke is supposed to be that relationships never change.

The joke is supposed to be… there.

Nobody Wants This follows the formula of a lot of romantic comedies. The couple have a meet-cute (in this case, Joanne embarasses herself at a dinner party by assuming that no one as confident and good-looking as Noah could possibly be a man of God). Some friends and family get way too invested in the couple’s love life (her sister/podcast partner Morgan, played by Justine Lupe; his overprotective mother Bina, played by Tovah Feldshuh, who seethes the word shiksa out with a serpentine slur). Job stuff gets in the way (will a Jewish congregation ever truly respect a rabbi who is dating outside the faith?). And then … Well, you’ll have to watch to see what happens.

The Ben Stiller movie Keeping the Faith, Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s based-on-a-true-story Oscar nominee The Big Sick, the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag… lots of film and TV series have conquered the topic of dating outside one’s culture and whether it’s a Faustian bargain to potentially sacrifice your own culture and beliefs in the name of love. 

Those projects are also built on the tenet that the central couple is a couple worthy of the fight; a relationship so compelling that it’s worth it to both the other people who are in these stories and the real ones watching from the outside to put away their own problems and emotions for a bit and care about what happens between these two.

But Nobody Wants This hasn’t convinced me that Joanne and Noah are a couple worth the fight. Why would I root for a woman whose biggest life problem is that she doesn’t know if the female members of her new boyfriend’s friend group will like her? The same person who is so codependent on her sister that she video messages her not just post-coital but while she is still in bed. Why would I root for a man who is so insecure about his job and public perception that he freaks out when a congregant sees him in a sex shop? Especially when he was previously so ambivalent about said congregant that he didn’t know that the man was visiting the shop with a woman who isn’t his wife?

And why would I want to root for a show that relies so heavily on stereotypes about Jewish culture that it’s either lazy or antisemitic? Of course all the Jewish wives are controlling banshees, ruled over by Jackie Tohn’s Esther. Of course Noah has mother issues and Bina treats him like a golden prince. Of course his family is rich but we’re never really sure why. Of course his ex-girlfriend is a perfect human with nonexistent pores. 

Look, interfaith marriage among more secular Jews is rapidly growing (and guess what, in this instance, hi. I’m the problem, it’s me). Nobody Wants This could have discussed the fears and concerns that a lot of people in interfaith or interracial marriages have when it comes to personal beliefs pressure from parents and even raising a new generation of children. It could have shown that there’s not always an either-or outcome. 

Instead, it’s just a show that—as costar Timothy Simons has already pointed out on social media—has a title that makes it really, really easy to mock.

Nobody Wants This premieres Sept. 26 on Netflix.

Whitney Friedlander is an entertainment journalist with, what some may argue, an unhealthy love affair with her TV. A former staff writer at both Los Angeles Times and Variety, her writing has also appeared in Cosmopolitan, Vulture, The Washington Post and others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, daughter, and cats.