Nobody Wants This is a rare gem: a funny romcom with serious stakes

Nobody Wants This
Netflix from September 26
★★★★

When Noah (Adam Brody) meets Joanne (Kristen Bell) at a dinner party, he asks the host, “Is she Jewish at all?” There’s not a Jewish bone in her body, replies Ashley (Sherry Cola). “Unless you put one in her.”

It’s that kind of lightly smutty sass that makes this romcom about the star-cross’d lovers – one a hot rabbi, the other a shiksa goddess – such a delight. That and the undeniable chemistry between the leads, who have been real-life pals for years.

Kristen Bell (left) as Joanne and Justine Lupe as Morgan.Credit: Hopper Stone/Netflix

Created by Erin Foster, this 10-episode series draws heavily from her own experience. Like Joanne, she hosted a dating podcast with her sister, fell for a Jewish guy, faced enormous resistance to their pairing, but found a way through it. The course of true love never did run smooth, but she stayed with it, eventually converting to Judaism and marrying music industry executive Simon Tikhman.

(Some stuff that’s not in the show but is still worth knowing: Foster is a former actor, and she and her sister Sara are the daughters of Grammy-winning musician David Foster, created the reality TV parody Barely Famous together, and were creative directors of the dating app Bumble from 2017-20. An average Jane she is not.)

The attraction between Joanne and Noah is immediate and obvious, but there are all sorts of reasons why they should deny it – and plenty of people urging them to do so. For Morgan (Justine Lupe, Succession’s Willa), the romance is turning her sister into a bore, and dulling the spark on their podcast just as a major publisher wants to pick it up.

For ex-fiancee Rebecca (Emily Arlook), Noah just needs to come to his senses, get over this fascination with the tiny blonde goy, and get back to marrying and having kids and becoming the big man at their temple. For Noah’s sister-in-law Esther (Jackie Tohn), Joanne will never be anything but Whore Number One (her sister is Whore Number Two). And for his mother Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), she will simply never be with her boy, period. “Everyone knows that shiksas are just for practice,” she says.

Every romcom has the Obstacle, and often they feel contrived and easily subverted, if only the protagonists weren’t so dumb/stubborn/blind. In Nobody Wants This, though, it feels real, and substantial. It doesn’t take long for Noah to begin pondering the viability of his new girlfriend converting to Judaism, and the question only becomes more pressing as their romance becomes more serious.

For Jews, this is an existential question. Many adhere to the notion of matrilineal descent; a Jewish man choosing to be with a non-Jewish woman thus reduces the pool of potential Jewish offspring. The woman’s conversion isn’t just a matter of personal choice, it’s about keeping the culture, the heritage, the faith, alive. How much more so for a rabbi.

None of this occludes the comedy, or the romance. But it does mean that alongside the deftly observed character studies and mean-girl power dynamics and fetishising of the other, Nobody Wants This brings real stakes to the table.

It’s a romcom with heft, in other words. What’s not to love about that?

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