If there’s one thing that defines a great romcom, it’s a simple yet compelling premise. Two friends fight to keep their relationship platonic through the years; a bookseller has a chance affair with a movie star; love sparks between strangers via a radio call-in show. And you could very easily add “gentile host of a sex podcast falls for a rabbi” to that list. So it proved, with the first season of Netflix’s Nobody Wants This. But you know something else that unifies those great romantic comedies? They don’t have sequels. With that in mind, Nobody Wants This returns this week for its second season, battling valiantly against the tide of history.
After Joanne (Kristen Bell) made her grand romantic gesture – breaking things off with Noah so he could take up a gig as head rabbi – Noah (Adam Brody) has thrown away his professional shot for love. For Joanne, this is “a big, beautiful, healthy relationship with a real-life adult man”, but the compromise they’ve muddled towards leaves a lot to be desired. Will Joanne convert to Judaism? Will Noah reconcile his ambition with the realities of his relationship? Can their lives, and particularly their insubordinate chorus – Joanne’s hot-mess sister Morgan (Justine Lupe), Noah’s self-possessed brother Sasha (Timothy Simons), and Sasha’s droll wife Esther (Jackie Tohn) – satisfactorily commingle? “The honeymoon phase is over,” Morgan warns Joanne. “Now the real relationship starts.”
The big question looming over the couple – whose chemistry in the first season was so intense that it bordered on pornographic – is one of faith. Faith in itself (“I’m on a mission to learn more about Judaism,” Joanne flatly observes), and faith in their compatibility. The success of the show’s first season lay partly in its sense of surprise. Joanne is a spunky, Meg Ryanesque protagonist, but religious teachers rarely make for exciting love interests. In response, the internet was flooded with memes about the “hot rabbi”. The collective thirst for a soft-boy demeanour (and leading-man good looks) gave the show an intrigue that perhaps wasn’t merited by its predictable plot. From the pair’s fizzing first flirtations, it was clear that Nobody Wants This was moving towards a happy union of rabbi and shiksa.
And that was where the first season ended up, sort of. It leaves this second series struggling not to simply relitigate those old arguments. “I didn’t think we’d tabled it,” Joanne reveals of her hypothetical conversion. “I thought we’d taken it off the table.” So, while Joanne and Noah slip back into this old dynamic, ever more space is given to the supporting cast, with mixed results. With Esther now a key member of the ensemble, her acerbic barbs are pared back so that she can have civil conversations with Sasha, Morgan and Joanne. This somewhat defangs her, removing one of the show’s few areas of tension. And Morgan – despite being fun, and charismatic, and everything else you could want from a podcast host – is starting to become irritating. Her relationship with Dr Andy (played by Lupe’s Succession castmate Arian Moayed) feels rushed and tonally out of place.
It's possible that Nobody Wants This has always been a bit messier than its simple premise suggested. Is it a warts-and-all relationship comedy in the vein of Lena Dunham or Judd Apatow, or something zanier, more screwball, in the Harold Ramis mould? Creator Erin Foster writes the interplay between Joanne and Noah so well that even this meandering second season is endlessly moreish, the bouncy pop music making it feel like The Summer I Turned Pretty for embittered millennials. But the show still doesn’t feel entirely comfortable luxuriating in the space of a 10-episode series. It’s both a compliment and a criticism to say that Nobody Wants This feels like a brilliant feature-length romcom, when it’s not.
All the things that made Nobody Wants This a hit are still there. Bell and Brody still sparkle, even if their badinage is less unexpected. Guest stars like Leighton Meester and Seth Rogen bring fun new dynamics to the table. And it’s still bingeable in a way that feels purpose-built to scratch a mid-thirties brain. It’s just equally clear that the show, having arrived at its final-act showdown, is wandering in the wilderness. Sometimes, you just need to have a bit more faith in your premise.
