Netflix’s New Romcom ‘Nobody Wants This’ Might Be Just What You Want

A cool young rabbi is on the rise at his temple. He’s single, so members are constantly trying to make love connections with the eligible young Jewish women in their acquaintance. So it’s inconvenient for him when the woman he can’t stop thinking about definitely isn’t Jewish. Can they make things work? Should they even try? 

The path to love is rocky indeed for Jake Schram (Ben Stiller) and Anna Riley (Jenna Elfman) in Keeping the Faith, the 2000 feature film debut of director Edward Norton, who also stars as Brian Finn, a Catholic priest who happens to be both Jake’s best friend AND hopelessly hung up on Anna. 

Evidently, the stresses of interfaith relationships haven’t lessened in the near-quarter-century since Keeping the Faith’s release: now Netflix is premiering a new sitcom with almost exactly the same premise. But considering that we’ve seen it before with the Jewish heartthrob and adorable blonde of a previous generation, Nobody Wants This works unexpectedly well.

Nobody Wants This shares its title with a fictional podcast in-universe, which Joanne (Kristen Bell), this story’s adorable blonde, co-hosts with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe). When their producer Ashley (Sherry Cola) invites Joanne to a dinner party and warns her that one of the guests is a rabbi, Joanne thinks she clocks him right away, and instead makes a beeline to the cute guy who easily falls into teasing banter with Joanne about the showstopping chinchilla coat. (It’s faux, she claims, but she also seems like the kind of person who wouldn’t have any moral qualms about wearing the real thing.) 

When Joanne discovers that her sparring partner Noah (Adam Brody) is the rabbi, she lets him walk her out, but doesn’t pursue things further — or, at least, she tries not to, until she’s on a bad date, gets a text from Ashley letting her know that Noah’s been asking about her, and heads straight for his temple to catch the end of his sermon. When Noah slips away from the crush of worshipers shoving young women at the newly single rabbi to greet Joanne, temple members look on furiously. “Who the hell is that?” asks Esther (Jackie Tohn), Noah’s sister-in-law. Noah’s mother Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), with all the bile she can muster, growls, “A shiksa.” 

Bina’s right, technically: “Shiksa” has long been used as a shorthand for “Gentile woman,” though some would call it a slur. Somehow, though, this is one of the many facts about Judaism that Joanne and Morgan — despite having apparently grown up in Los Angeles, a city that’s home to more than half a million Jews — manage not to have learned. When they ask Noah and his brother Sasha (Timothy Simons) about it, Morgan mispronouncing it “shiska,” they explain that it literally means “impure and detestable,” but that “these days, it just means you’re a hot, blonde non-Jew.” 

Morgan loves it, chirping that they could rename their podcast Shiksas! I get that producers of Nobody Wants This need to get exposition about Judaism into the show somehow (assuming we consider this to be arcane and exotic knowledge, which… do we?), but there has to have been a way that didn’t make its co-lead look like a moron. Take it from someone who was raised so Catholic that her father was on his way to becoming a priest before he met her mom and quit: “shiksa” is entry-level stuff.

The discussion is, unfortunately, typical of the characterization of Joanne and her closest relatives. Their mother Lynn (Stephanie Faracy) has thrown herself head-first into pursuits like doing ayahuasca and working with a “voice biologist,” claiming that Joanne’s loud sighing is a sign of trouble with her liver. We learn almost immediately that Lynn and the sisters’ father Henry (Michael Hitchcock) are separated due to Henry’s having come out as gay, but it’s not clear how many of Lynn’s woo-woo obsessions arose after this life-changing event (again: they live in L.A.). But her daughters are cheerfully ignorant and superficial: Joanne tells Noah her biggest fear is “a bad facelift” (before managing to go a little deeper); Morgan insists that the expression is “Why drink the milk when you can buy the cow for free?” 

Finding out, in a recent Vulture profile, all the attributes and biographical details Joanne shares with series creator Erin Foster was alarming, but illuminating. I get that part of Joanne’s journey is accepting her imperfections so that she can allow herself to be loved by a worthy partner. I’m just concerned, now, that Foster doesn’t see how imperfect Joanne actually is. (That it’s coming out of notorious oversharer Kristen Bell adds another dimension to Joanne’s often grating bullshit.)

Yet, miraculously, the show works, almost in spite of what Joanne (and Bell) bring to it. Brody definitely has the easier part, as the steady, reasonable half of the couple who gets to wait calmly while his counterpart spins out; even in the episode cited in the Vulture profile, in which Joanne gets “The Ick” from Noah’s attempts to impress her parents, he’s attempting to impress her parents, while she acts like a shallow brat. My biggest knock on Noah’s character is that we don’t get more insight into what aspects of his career fulfill him, and thus, what he’d really be giving up if he committed to Joanne. But generally speaking, the charm that’s sustained Brody through his long career doesn’t fail him here. For instance: admitting, at the end of their first evening together, that he fibbed about where his car was so that he could walk Joanne to hers, Noah says he actually got a parking spot right in front of Ashley’s house, shrugging, “God likes me.” 

God can get in line. 

Far more attention has been paid to the world-building around Noah, too. An episode about Noah and Sasha’s rec league basketball team going to the playoffs, a process during which Noah tries to strategize ways for Joanne to endear herself to all the guys’ girlfriends and wives, is plotted like a heist movie. The fault lines under Esther’s relationship with Bina are elegantly rendered, as when we learn from Bina that they don’t serve red wine anymore because “there have been incidents.” “It was Esther both times,” Sasha coughs. The hilarious Tohn gets to kick into a whole new gear as soon as Esther understands that while she’s been shutting Joanne out due to her loyalty to Rebecca (Emily Arlook), Noah’s recent ex, keeping Joanne in the family means an automatic promotion to favorite daughter-in-law. Bina even asks Esther to cut up a cucumber! IN BINA’S KITCHEN!!!

If you watched the trailer and were put off either by the retread of a premise or by Kristen Bell’s extremely Kristen Bell-y character, I really get it. I was once like you. If you can, romcom fans should try to push through. Yes, this is the kind of show where a character screws up the gift of a custom charcuterie board because she doesn’t know which animals fancy meats actually come from, and those gags are deeply annoying. But, on balance, Nobody Wants This belies its fate-tempting title and manages to be sweet, heartfelt and very funny. 

I can’t say whether God likes it, but I did.