This will-they-won’t-they between a rabbi and a sex podcaster is as funny, sweet, scabrous and romantic as comedy gets. Everybody will want this …
Lemme tell you – everybody wants this. It’s the funniest, sweetest, most scabrous, most romantic, most real thing we’ve seen since – well, since Colin from Accounts. Bell plays a freewheeling thirtysomething woman who hosts an increasingly successful podcast with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) about sex and relationships (latest episode – Dildo’s and Dildon’ts). She is as agnostic-pretty-much-atheist as the next thirtysomething gentile-about-town. Brody plays a rabbi who has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend who, along with both their families, expected him to propose imminently. Noah is a progressive rabbi but one who still – “though I play up the Torah bad boy vibe” – is clear that he is “all in on this thing”. He and Joanne meet at a party and the attraction is instant, mutual and ever more difficult to resist. It is also that rarest thing – utterly convincing to the audience.
Brody and Bell have worked together before and are friends in real life, which surely helps, but their on-screen chemistry – in the romantic scenes, sure, but more importantly and even more potently in the bantering, teasing conversations in between – is something special and a joy to watch. “Can you have sex?” she asks him as he escorts her to her car. “Yes. That’s priests. We’re just normal people. And we’re trying to repopulate a people, you know?” A little later she tells him to: “Say something rabbinical.” He leans in towards her … “Fiddler on the roof.” “Don’t be funny,” she replies. “It’s not helping.” By this point I am already prepared to sacrifice my favourite pet to make sure these two end up together. Bell and Brody are accomplished comic and dramatic actors in their own rights but together they are even more than the sum of their parts.
And they are surrounded by a fantastic supporting cast. First among equals is Lupe – so understatedly wonderful as Willa in Succession – as Joanna’s slightly more jaded sister and co-presenter. The fact that it is the two of them against a terrible dating world and their parents (“Dad’s gay and Mom is still in love with him”) diminishes their truth-telling and bickering not a jot. “Joanne was a lesbian for a year,” Morgan tells potential podcast investors, sparking off another squabble. “That’s where she really thrived.” You would listen avidly to their podcast.
Noah has a brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons, a bear of a man with the nimblest imaginable comic timing) who has all of Noah’s warmth, less of his intellectualising and is happily married to – and equally happily terrorised by – his Jewish wife Esther (Jackie Tohn) and their children. Their deep, underlying marital harmony is as convincingly rendered as every other part of the show. It’s always refreshing to see a comedy that doesn’t feel the need to denigrate the settled state of affairs just because its protagonists are still at the initial, more obviously exciting stage.
Creator Erin Foster’s evident love for and care with her characters, alongside the fact that the show is born of her own experience of falling in love as a non-Jew with a Jewish man (not a rabbi, but she converted for him), plus a script touched by greatness, means she can get away with jokes that might otherwise seem to sail too close to the wind. A now-almost-traditional faux pas – the private text inadvertently broadcast over Bluetooth speakers in the car, this time from Morgan to Joanne about how Noah doesn’t look Jewish, while Sasha is “brutal” – detonates an explosion of comebacks from the delighted brothers. “There are some very attractive Jews! Ever seen a young Mandy Patinkin?” “Does my brother not look like he could control the media?” demands Sasha. “I apologise for my sister,” says Joanne, sitting in the passenger seat next to Morgan. “With whom I have since cut ties.”
Beneath it all, the emotional stakes feel real. The pair’s different cultures, the lack of faith versus religion as a guiding force, the disapproval of families, potential ostracism, the possible impact on Noah’s career, the circumscription of Joanne’s freedom if she did become a rabbi’s wife – these are genuine problems, obstacles to happiness with no obvious answers. But I shall be with them to what I hope will not be a bitter end. As do my pets.
As a millennial Jewish woman, the new Netflix series Nobody Wants This hooked me with a concept: “Adam Brody plays a hot Rabbi.” And, yes, when I actually watched the 10-episode romantic comedy, the star of The O.C. lived up to expectations in the role of Rabbi Noah Roklov. He’s barely aged a day since playing Seth Cohen in the early 2000s and is charming in that self-deprecating way the actor has mastered over his decades on television.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel let down. While it offers up the fantasy of the ideal Jewish man in Noah, the series seems to loathe Jewish women, who are portrayed as nags, harpies, and the ultimate villains of this story. I wanted to be swept away by a rom-com. Instead, I was faced with the reality that maybe this show actually hates me.
Nobody Wants This is created by Erin Foster, the daughter of music producer and composer David Foster who was formerly the star of the short-lived VH1 reality TV parody Barely Famous in which she and her sister Sara played fictionalized versions of themselves looking for fame. In real life, Foster converted to Judaism to marry entertainment exec Simon Tikhman. Their wedding was covered by Vogue. Here she offers up a spin on her own story. Her alter ego is Joanne, played by Kristen Bell, who, like Foster, has a podcast with her sister, Morgan (Succession’s Justine Lupe), where they talk about their chaotic sex lives and bad taste in men.
At a dinner party, Joanne meets Noah after initially assuming a more stereotypically Jewish-looking man was the rabbi she expected to be attending. Despite the accidental antisemitism in their meet cute, Noah begins to fall for this pint-sized firecracker. Of course, the fact that he’s a rabbi complicates things: He is expected to marry a Jewish girl, and the very blonde Joanne is not at all Jewish. In fact, she’s almost shockingly unaware of the most basic of Jewish customs, especially for a privileged person living in Los Angeles. Joanne, for instance, doesn’t know what “Shalom” means. I grew up in the same L.A. circles. A real-life Joanne would have definitely attended multiple bat mitzvahs in her day.
To be with Noah, Joanne must overcome her own insecurities about relationships. To be with Joanne, Noah must figure out how to make his career and his faith coexist with his choice in a woman. Standing in their way is a horde of judgmental Jewish women including Noah’s mother Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), his sister-in-law Esther (Jackie Tohn), and his ex Rebecca (Emily Arlook). While Joanne is by no means perfect—she’s immature and messy—these brunette ladies are one-dimensional nightmares who together fuel stereotypes. They are needy, overbearing, and nasty.
The non-Jewish woman—a.k.a. the “shiksa”—has long been idolized by Jewish men in popular culture. In Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer falls for the title character played by Diane Keaton, who tells him, “you’re what Grammie Hall would call a real Jew.” In Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, Charles Grodin’s Lenny Cantrow essentially abandons his Jewish newlywed Lila Kolodny (Jeannie Berlin) to chase after Cybill Shepherd on a beach. In the musical The Last Five Years, which will be on Broadway next year more than two decades after its off-Broadway premiere, novelist Jamie sings an ode to his “shiksa goddess,” Cathy. “I’m breaking my mother’s heart,” he croons. “The longer I stand looking at you the more I hear it splinter and crack from 90 miles away.”
Nobody Wants This, by contrast, operates largely from the perspective of the shiksa. Here she’s as equally in love with the Jewish man as he is with her, but she’s not sold on adopting his culture as her own. And why would she be when it seems so unfriendly?
“Who the hell is that?” Esther asks Bina at the end of the pilot episode after Joanne ditches a date to show up at Noah’s temple where he’s giving a sermon. Bina responds with anger, “A shiksa.” Esther then follows Noah and his brother Sasha (Veep’s Timothy Simons) to the bar where they’ve gone out with Joanne and Morgan. Esther beckons her husband to the car by honking her horn and calling the sisters “whore number one and whore number two.” Bina, meanwhile, has a thick Eastern European accent, and is vaguely threatening when she confronts her son about dating Joanne. Later, when Joanne meets her, Bina is briefly charmed but then whispers with a smile, “you’re never going to end up with my son” like a mob boss.
And they aren’t the only Jewish female targets of Nobody Wants This. Rebecca gets off slightly easier—she’s not as outwardly mean and is genuinely heartbroken—but she’s still painted in an unflattering light. Noah breaks up with her after she presumptuously startings wearing an engagement ring before he’s proposed. She later lies to Morgan, who she meets in a bar, about the status of her and Noah’s relationship with the goal of torturing Joanne. Plus, the other “wives and girlfriends”—or WAGS—of the guys on Noah’s basketball team, the Matzah Ballers, are all superficial followers of Esther, either obsessed with their weddings, their children, or their tacky jewelry brands.
They are all what some would call Jewish American Princesses, or JAPs, a semi-offensive term that has been reclaimed by some Jewish women. For instance, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show with a Jewish heroine played by co-creator Rachel Bloom (and coincidentally also starring Feldshuh as the Jewish mother), staged a hilarious “JAP Battle.” But Nobody Wants This has none of the lived-in knowledge that makes the Crazy Ex scene funny. Instead, it’s a tourist’s view of Judaism with an outsider’s observation of Jewish women. The only one that is presented as entirely benevolent is a rabbi played by Leslie Grossman who Joanne meets at the camp where Noah works.
This is not to discredit Foster’s claim to Judaism as a convert. But that doesn’t let her off the hook for dealing in cheap stereotypes for lame jokes instead of offering up nuanced depictions of complicated women. Joanne and Morgan are allowed to be misguided but lovable. Their opponents are simply mean.
The men, by the way, are presented as eminently more chill. Sasha is a fun stoner who bonds with Morgan over being the “loser sibling.” Sasha and Noah’s dad (Paul Ben-Victor) likes to schvitz and take naps. You can see why Joanne would want to be married to a Jewish man; you can see why she’s not sure about wanting to become a Jewish woman.
That’s the ultimate letdown of Nobody Wants This. What should be a show about a woman’s entrance into and embrace of Jewish culture instead perpetuates the worst ideas about Jewish women. I wanted to fall in love. Instead, I just felt targeted. And I’m not just bitter because the bitch’s name is Esther. I promise.
It’s a well-known cliché to write what you know. For creator Erin Foster (“Barely Famous”), that meant her Netflix rom-com “Nobody Wants This” came into focus during her own religious conversion, which Foster undertook a few years ago when she fell in love with her Jewish now-husband.
While downloading a fellow producer on the latest conversion class goss, they suggested Foster turn her experience converting to the Jewish faith into a docuseries. But Foster was already halfway through the process, so they switched the pitch to a scripted show called “Shiksas.” The original plan was for Foster to star in it as well, but while developing, they ran into an unexpected issue.
“The truth is, there wasn’t enough conflict there,” Foster said. “Just having a guy who’s Jewish in L.A., meeting a girl in 2024, how many stories can you really tell? And so one of our producers said, ‘Hear me out. What if he’s a rabbi?‘ And at first I was like, ‘No, no. That makes no sense.’ And then as soon as I let it sit, I thought, ‘I think that’s a really good idea.’ And once we had that puzzle piece, everything started to open.”
“Everything” meant assembling a millennial dream of a cast for what became “Nobody Wants This,” with Kristen Bell, whom Netflix wanted, and Adam Brody leading the 10-episode season centering on a big-mouth agnostic podcast host who always dates the wrong guys and a nice rabbi just getting out of a serious relationship. Brody’s wiseass brother is played by the always-delightful Timothy Simons, and Bell’s sister (and co-podcast host) is “Succession” favorite Justine Lupe.
Foster knew getting the role of dreamy Rabbi Noah right was key to making this a smash (and rest assured: “Nobody Wants This” will absolutely be a Netflix smash).
“You can’t name a Jewish actor who didn’t audition,” Foster said. “There was this kind of cynicism in all these guys that this character couldn’t have. He needed to have a genuine warmth about him, and he needed to have a softness [and] sweetness. Adam just has that. The character is inspired by my husband, and my husband is someone who can’t make you feel bad, like it’s not possible. He just shines this sweetness and goodness and makes people feel seen, and makes you laugh, and I was trying to capture that feeling to pair him with this cynical character, and Adam was the only one who had that purity about him.”
Brody, last seen on TV in “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” nails the role of Noah, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who spent their post-“The O.C.” years hoping he would be up for a rom-com project such as this one. It’s a simplification to say he’s playing grown-up Seth Cohen, but it’s certainly a role closer to the one that made him famous than he’s tackled in many years.
“I really wanted to sprinkle in little information and trivia about Judaism without being too heavy-handed,” Foster said. “You know, I don’t think a lot of people are coming to the show to watch a religious show. And so it really isn’t intended to be that. But he’s a rabbi, and it would be silly to not have Judaism in the show, because that is his job. I really want the audience to watch an episode and go, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize that’s like, where Shabbat came from,’ or ‘I didn’t know that’s what rabbis could do or couldn’t do.'” (For any inquiring minds: Unlike Hot Priests, rabbis can have sex.)
That said rabbi is as perfectly crush-worthy as Brody? That’s just a fun little TV bonus.
“If you’re gonna have a rom-com with a rabbi, you gotta make him hot,” Foster said. “And the idea of a hot rabbi is so funny to me, because no one I’ve ever met has ever known a hot rabbi. I think that there should be more hot rabbis. And so I just wanted to give Jewish girls the thing they deserve, which is a hot rabbi to look up to.”
Mission accomplished.
Did you ever wonder where Seth Cohen, the fictional character from The O.C., ended up? The actor who portrayed him with such heart, Adam Brody, has some thoughts.
Brody stars opposite Kristen Bell in Netflix's funny new series Nobody Wants This, which premieres Sept. 26. It follows Joanne (Bell), an agnostic L.A. podcast host, and Noah (Brody), an unconventional rabbi, who passionately fall for each other. Noah has some similarities to Cohen, and not because they are both Jewish. It's Noah's quick wit and flirty onscreen banter that might give viewers some nostalgic Seth Cohen pangs.
When Yahoo Entertainment caught up with Brody, he said we're not entirely off base with that comparison, but he was clear: “I do not think Seth Cohen would’ve been a rabbi.”
“I don’t think he had rabbi energy, or at least he was headed down that track,” Brody quipped. “I think this person, Noah, has known what he has wanted to do since he was 9 and has been wholly committed to this. I think Seth had a lot of other interests that didn’t involve the Torah or basketball.”
Nobody Wants This is loosely based on creator Erin Foster's life as she converted to Judaism for husband Simon Tikhman. (Tikhman is a music executive, not a rabbi). Part of what makes the show work so well is the chemistry between Bell and Brody, which Foster has praised as “hot.” It's funny, given the fact that Brody, Bell and their respective spouses, Leighton Meester and Dax Shepard, are all friends. So did that make their (multiple) kissing scenes weird to shoot at all?
“I wouldn’t say it was weird,” Bell tells Yahoo about kissing her friend.
“I wouldn’t say it was weird, either,” Brody agrees.
“There was a comfort to it for sure because a) we’d worked together before as love interests. We have enough mutual friends and know each other’s spouses,” Bell says. “There’s … a comfort level, right? Because I can say anything to Adam. I know he can say something to me. There’s no weird energy between us. I mean, we were both, I think, a little startled reading [the] script where we had to kiss, where it said it was going to be the world’s greatest kiss [in Episode 2].”
However, the Frozen star credits her and Brody’s friendship for being able “to create something from a safe place.”
“Also, after you kind of do the first one or do it a few times, then you’re in the zone,” Brody added. “We didn’t make sex scenes, that’s another kettle of fish.”
Nobody Wants This begins streaming Thursday, Sept. 26, on Netflix.
