Kristen Bell, left, as Joanne, and Adam Brody, as Noah, in Nobody Wants This on Netflix.Netflix
Never has a title been so inaccurate as Nobody Wants This.
In actuality, the new Netflix show of that name, which stars Kristen Bell and Adam Brody, is the steamy streaming romcom that everybody has been wanting for years – or at least everybody who watched and swooned while watching the second season of Fleabag.
You’ll recall that final season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s breakout comedy found her funny, sexual and morally dubious big-city dame falling for an off-limits hot priest, played with sensitivity, spirituality and sex appeal by Andrew Scott. Viewers still talk about it, and still have to catch their breath as they do so.
Nobody Wants This, by contrast, features Bell as a funny, sexual and morally dubious big-city dame who falls for a hot rabbi, played with sensitivity, spirituality and sex appeal by Adam Brody.
Yes, the same Brody who was Seth Cohen on The O.C. back in the day, a character described by reliable source Teen Vogue as “the dream boyfriend of alternative girls everywhere in the early aughts.”
Somehow, despite having access to the most powerful algorithm in the world, it is has taken five years for Netflix to figure out that there is an appetite for another comic-tortuous love affair between a ripped religious leader and a dithery woman (and that Brody should be in it). But it’s now here – and we can breathe easily, or heavily, again.
The creator of Nobody Wants This, Erin Foster, based it on her own love story and, thankfully, not one of her father’s, Canadian composer and record producer David Foster. (The Foster paterfamilias is now on his fifth wife, singer Katharine McPhee, who is a couple years younger than his daughter.)
The show is set in L.A. and centres on Joanne, who makes her living dishing about her disappointing dates and adventurous sex life on a podcast hosted with her sister, Morgan (Succession’s Justine Lupe).
When we meet Joanne, she’s ghosting a man mid-date. The reason: He started crying about his grandmother’s death. “Save it for the podcast!” cries Morgan, when she starts to tell her about it.
Meanwhile, Noah (Brody), a kind rabbi who no doubt could sit with anyone grieving for at least seven days without contemplating a French exit, breaks up with his very nice and very boring long-term girlfriend, Rebecca, after she discovers that he has bought an engagement ring and has not yet proposed. He has to explain why: He’s just not feeling what he thinks he should be feeling.
Shortly thereafter, Joanne and Noah get that missing feeling in a meet-cute moment at a dinner party hosted by Joanne’s manager (an unfortunately under-utilized Sherry Cola). Noah fails to properly open a bottle of wine – clearly, he’s no priest – and she’s wearing a ridiculous chinchilla coat.
There’s a classic misunderstanding, and then a long walk to a car that is so full of chemistry you forget to worry about how much wine either of them has drunk before driving. It’s hot, and the kissing doesn’t even start for another episode.
So what’s the problem? Rabbis don’t have the same prohibition on dating dirtbags as priests do, but Noah’s in running for head rabbi at his synagogue, and he seems unlikely to get the job while casually dating a shiksa (non-Jewish woman) sexcaster.
As for Joanne, she’s feeling pressure not to settle down because her podcast is quite popular, and she and her sister seem about to land a deal with Spotify. Who would she be if she made a choice of husband – or maybe even religion?
Nobody Wants This, which follows the romcom formula now established long ago by Judd Apatow of dirty jokes and no judgment, is charming even if it has a number of holes in its premise.
Bell is too established to entirely credibly play a character trying to chase the Call Her Daddy demographic, and her L.A. apartment is about 10 times too big to be that of an unsigned podcaster.
Then, there’s just how little Joanne knows about Judaism. Not knowing the word, “shiksa,” maybe, but not knowing that prosciutto is pork?
But who cares, as long as the romance works and there are a few good laughs in between; the biggest ones come from the subplot involving Noah’s brother Sasha (Veep’s very tall, very funny Timothy Simons) who is married to a very judgmental friend-of-Rebecca’s named Esther (an excellently deployed Jackie Tohn).
Hopefully, Netflix’s algorithm will learn from this and we’ll get more of what everybody wants – which is not Waller-Bridge in the Star Wars, James Bond or Indiana Jones universes, but more romances, requited or not, between imams and mantraps, vicars and vixens, and pandits and glamour-pusses. The possibilities are endless.